Directing Animator / Moderator
Posted:
Nov 4, 2005, 12:11 AM
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A Solid Gold LTGC#3, Part One
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As the saying goes, "the third time's the charm"... and the third installment of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection has much to recommend itself to cartoon fans everywhere. In some respects it outshines the previous two volumes in terms of quality. For starters, the introductory menu screens look magnificent; the viewer is greeted with a blazing WB shield and Stalling-Era orchestral flourish that evokes the Warner Bros./First National studio's heyday in the 1940's. This is a great and long-overdue improvement over the earlier, chintzy-looking menu screens.
Second, and most important, the remastered cartoons are brilliant and near-perfect in terms of visual quality. Dust specks and other slight imperfections inherent in the cel layouts are, of course, made all the more visible from the high resolution of the DVD format; in Hare Remover there is even a brief moment when a patched tear in one of the background paintings is noticable during a horizontal panning shot. Like the classic cartoons in which they occur, however, these momentary anomalies are historical documents and should be cherished as such.
No apologies need be made for the monaural soundtracks; the refurbished audio is clean with no trace of the artificial resonance or psudo-stereo re-mixing that can mar and muddy vintage recordings. The soundtracks from 1953 onward have a definition and presence that are breathtaking; the original recording sessions even more so... There aren't quite as many recording sessions offered in this volume as in the previous two; but they are all buried treasure nonetheless. In fact, for the first time a complete recording session (or a combination of two or more different sessions) for Hillbilly Hare has been made available--including the instrumental square dance sequence, sans Mel Blanc's contributions, that is the highlight of the cartoon. The music score to this cartoon (minus voices and SFX) had originally been featured in part on the CD compilation, The Carl Stalling Project: Music From The Warner Bros. Cartoons, 1936-1958. According to Mike Barrier's audio commentary for this short, animator Phil Monroe (who had animated other cartoons for Jones and Clampett) was an afficianado of square dancing and often held dances on the Warner Studio backlot in a refurbished basement during liesure hours. His expertise in square dance calling (apparently a punishable offense in Chuck Jones' Drip-Along Daffy) was a catalyst in the genesis of this cartoon and lent more than an air of authenticity to its climactic sequence.
The extra features are, as usual, informative and entertaining. I must admit to having always jumped ahead to these when viewing each DVD set in the series. Viewers finally can get a behind-the-scenes look at the restoration processes involved in preserving the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies in the "Behind the Tunes" segment, entitled, Fine Tooning: Restoring the Warner Bros. Cartoons. In this segment Jerry Beck's presence during one of the interviews (he is shown seated next to George Feltenstein, the Senior Vice-President of Warner Home Video's Classic Catalog) is most telling. One gets the impression that he has been consistantly fighting tooth-and-nail to help ensure that the restoration work is being done properly for future volumes in the series. It is somewhat reassuring to watch this segment, because one can see that an effort is being made to restore the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies to their creators' original vision (unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the current remasterings of the MGM Tom and Jerry cartoons).
On that note; it should be pointed out that, in spite of the quality of the overall restoration work, there are nevertheless a number of Merrie Melodies cartoons that are unfortunately presented in their "Blue Ribbon" reissue prints. For those viewers who are perhaps seeing these cartoons for the very first time, I should explain what this means:
The Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons were two different series of theatrical animated shorts produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions (released by Warner Bros. from 1930 until 1944, when they bought out the cartoon studio). Both were produced and released in Black and White at their inception. The Merrie Melodies (essentially "one-shot" cartoons whose main purpose was to introduce new songs carried by Warners' music publishing concern) quickly switched to production in Technicolor--first the two-strip and then three-strip process. The Looney Tunes (which were vehicles for the studio's established starring characters) continued black and white production until 1943. Once the Looney Tunes switched to color production, the only fundamental difference between the two series for the next twenty years were their respective opening title cards and theme songs: "Merrily We Roll Along" for the Merrie Melodies series, and "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" for the Looney Tunes series.
In the 1950's the studio heads decided to cut down on production of new cartoons (to save money) and re-release earlier color Merrie Melodies in order to maintain their annual quota of shorts supplied to movie theatres. These cartoons bore a specially-designed "Blue Ribbon" title card to distinguish them from new productions. In order to further save money, it was also decided that the original opening credits (listing the director, writer, animators and voice artists) would be omitted in favor of simply superimposing the cartoon title over the Blue Ribbon title card. The original music cues that accompanied the opening credits were also excised, and a melodic extension of the "Merrily We Roll Along" theme music was heard instead. The problem with this was that later generations of viewers never got to see and hear the impressive (and always witty) original artwork and music cues that once accompanied these early shorts; nor did they have any inkling as to who had worked on these shorts. Often there were ocassions when the wrong title cards and music cues were grafted onto a cartoon. For example, an original Merrie Melodie cartoon might turn up bearing the "Looney Tunes" title and "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" theme music. In addition, sometimes the titles of cartoons were printed incorrectly. For example; the Blue Ribbon reissue of Tex Avery's 1940 Merrie Melodie, A Wild Hare (which wryly featured the hit song "I'm Just Wild About Harry" as the accompanying music cue to the original title card), misprints the title as "The Wild Hare". Bob Clampett's wacky 1946 Daffy Duck vehicle, Book Revue was erroneously re-titled: "Book Review".
In recent years, original title cards and music have been located in the studio vaults and attempts have been made in ernest to restore these to the cartoons from which they had been shorn; but overall the Warner Bros. cartoon library remains somewhat in a state of disarray. Alas, not all of the negatives for the original titles and music cues have survived. The studio heads at Warner Bros. didn't see any need to retain any of the bits that wound up on the cutting room floor; according to George Feltenstein, they obviously didn't forsee that people today would be upset over their tampering with the original films.
Another anomaly that has plagued the WB cartoon library is the proliferation of colorized versions of the original black and white Looney Tunes. This was a trend begun in the late 1960's when Warner Bros. (who by then had merged with the Seven Arts company) decided to re-release colorized versions of the early b&w cartoons to television. The process for recoloring these cartoons is known in the animation industry as rotoscoping; whereby the original film is projected frame-by-frame onto the underside of a translucent animation stand. The characters' movement is traced first onto paper and then inked and painted onto new cels and photographed over new color renditions of the original backgrounds. The rotoscoping was farmed out to animation plants in South Korea, and in most cases this was badly done. Many individual frames were often overlooked and so the movement in the colorized versions was not as full or fluid as in the original films. For many baby-boomers, these colorized versions were the only Looney Tunes they ever saw; and so it has been a revalation in recent years as more and more of the original black and white versions have come to light.
The present volume of LTGC offers no fewer than 12 classic black and white shorts; the majority of them in near-pristine condition. Of special note is Porky Pig's Feat, a classic 1943 effort directed by Frank Tashlin that features deft camera-work and one of the three cameo appearances by Bugs Bunny in a black and white cartoon (the other two were the "Private SNAFU" shorts, Gas and Three Brothers). For years I had known this short only from the colorized versions on TV, and later from a scratchy, dim-sounding 16mm black and white print. What a joy it was, then, to finally see and hear it in all it's original glory. The black and white Looney Tunes are confined mostly to Discs 2 and 3 in this set, and mainly feature Porky Pig.
Disc 2 actually serves, more or less, as a microcosm for the evolution of Porky. His first ever appearance was in Friz Freleng's two-strip Technicolor (limited to red, green, and brown hues) Merrie Melodie, I Haven't Got A Hat, in which he attempts to recite "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere". In that cartoon he was depicted as a little boy pig. When Tex Avery first worked with the character, Porky was transformed into an unattractive adult pig (who at one point in Gold Diggers of '49 is shown with a piggy bank "slit" on his back) Frank Tashlin had a brief go around with this early adult version in such outings as Porky's Romance (marking the first appearance of Petunia Pig) and Porky's Road Race (which here has its original "any similarity to..." disclaimer and a "Steppin' Fetchit" gag restored). When animator-turned-director Robert Clampett got his turn at bat, so to speak, he redesigned Porky to make him cuter and more childlike. Porky underwent something of an identity crisis during the late 1930's; being depicted simultaneously as a little boy/adolescent in such shorts as Porky And Teabiscuit (a wonderful entry directed jointly by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and Cal Dalton) and The Film Fan, and as an adult pig in Porky In Egypt. From 1940 onward, Porky was firmly established as an adult. In the late 40's he was featured in a number of shorts as a middle-class, suburbanite bachelor; occasionally sharing the billing with a nondescript mouse, as in Bye, Bye Bluebeard, but mostly being paired with other established characters like Miss Prissy in An Egg Scramble, Sylvester in Claws For Alarm, and Daffy Duck (either as an adversary or sidekick in previous cartoons) in Rocket Squad.
One other black and white Looney Tune (the very first one, to be exact) can be found in the "From the Vaults" section on Disc 2. This marked the official first appearance of Bosko, the Talk-Ink Kid, in the Looney Tune, Sinkin' In The Bathtub. This cartoon is unique for it's "earthy" humor. In one scene, an anthropomorphic bathtub gets up and starts streaming toilet paper all over the bathroom, in another scene, Bosko's car emerges from an outhouse with its back flap still undone (!) The cartoon also marks the first time a Warner Bros. cartoon character has a conniption and continuously shouts, "Hee, Hi, Ho"! Apparently this was a favorite epithet that director Rudolph Ising used to blurt out whenever he was especially distressed about something.
The very first black and white Merrie Melodie, It's Got Me Again!, is also featured on Disc 2; and depicts just one of the many battles between cats and mice that would ensue at the studio over the next two decades. Both this cartoon and "Sinkin' in the Bathtub" look and sound better than I can remember.
The three remaining black and white cartoons are contained on Disc 4 and are rare examples of wartime animation that the Schlesinger Studio supplied to the U.S. Armed Forces. In this case these are individual entries from the popular "Private Snafu" series produced for the Army/Navy Screen Magazine and distributed to servicemen overseas. Private SNAFU (short for "Situation Normal: All-Fouled-Up) was a military everyman who, more often than not, got himself in hot water for being ignorant of or oblivious to Army procedures. The series was written by Phil Eastman and Ted "Dr. Seuss" Giesel; with individual shorts directed by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Robert Clampett, and Frank Tashlin. Carl Stalling scored these episodes and Mel Blanc had a field day in being allowed to say words like "hell" and "damn" in an animated short (!) The episodes featured on Disc 4 include Spies, Rumors, and Snafuperman. The first short was featured in Volume 1 in the "Toonheads: The Lost Cartoons" segment; albeit with a slightly modified music track. The only problem is that these three shorts are not of the same quality as the other cartoons in Volume 3. It is highly likely that the original negatives for these cartoons were either lost or destroyed (possibly by the U.S. Military for security reasons), and that only a handful of poor-quality public domain prints are left. A DVD set from Bosko Video supposedly contains every surviving Private SNAFU short (26 were produced between 1943 and 1945); unfortunately that DVD is currently out of print. Sources have told me that the quality of the cartoons in that set is not much better than in LTGC3.
One other black and white title is worth mentioning here, although it is not technically a cartoon nor a short. In 1961 Warner Bros. Television produced a pilot episode for a proposed situation comedy called Philbert (Three's A Crowd) to be aired on ABC on Sunday nights at 8:00 PM. The proposed series was unique in that it would feature a blend of cel animation and live-action. The premise of the series was the relationship between a cartoonist (played by William Schallert) and his comic-book alter-ego (voiced by nightclub comic Trustin Howard). The animated sequences were directed by Friz Freleng and the live action by Richard "Lethal Weapon" Donner. An ongoing political situation between Warner Bros. and ABC resulted in the series never being picked up. The pilot episode never aired, was shelved, and then subsequently released in 1963 as a theatrical "featurette" (minus its original laugh track and theme song). The technical effects are impressive, to say the least. The animated sequences reportedly were difficult to execute; and had the series actually run on prime-time TV, it would have been a daunting task to provide these on a weekly basis. The pilot was produced in black and white (which was still the television industry standard in 1961) and so was the animation. Philbert is not a tremendously appealing character, and the "explanation" for his Mr. Ed-like existance offered by Schallert's character, Griff ("...you're retribution for my past transgressions..."), is not very convincing. There are no complaints about the visual or aural quality of the print, however; the pilot has been expertly remastered.
Part Two of this article will elaborate on the other color shorts and extra features contained in Volume 3.
Post your Comments On LTGC Volume 3 here.
(This post was edited by zavkram on Mar 15, 2006, 4:15 PM)
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