Category: Cartooning

Tommy José Stathes is an animation film collector, curator and historian. A few months before the panic of pandemic lockdown, I attended a very enjoyable and entertaining presentation by Stathes. The event was sponsored by Paul Howley’s comics and collectibles store, That’s Entertainment in Worcester, MA. The New York Times has this profile of Tommy.

I think [“Somewhere in Dreamland”] helped me to better understand and connect with the inner children in my own grandparents, all of whom were born right around the time of the 1929 stock market crash and grew up during the Great Depression.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/nyregion/stathes-vintage-cartoons.html

Tommy has posted “Somewhere in Dreamland” on his YouTube channel.

Fun fact about my friend Paul Howley. We were introduced almost 50 years ago at a Christian youth gathering that was held at Freedom Farm, in Bolton, MA. My girlfriend Karen thought I’d like to meet him because of our mutual interest in comic books. After many years as a Christian fellowship ministry, the Freedom Farm property was sold and it’s now a commercial operation.

My all-time best story about troubleshooting a problem at work involved Karen. I’ll have to tell it sometime.

As I said, I was looking for something Disney-related on YouTube. I didn’t find it, because Disney’s official online copy of “Steamboat Willie” not only looks terrible, it’s the censored version.

Here is a complete, uncensored copy, in much better quality. It appears to have been taken from the “Mickey Mouse in Black and White” DVD.

Mickey enjoys piloting the boat, but he isn’t the captain and he’s put to work. Instead, he sneaks his girlfriend on board and proceeds to goof off, not doing his job while having fun torturing animals. After the end of the cartoon Mickey probably made Minnie peel the potatoes.

The great Ub Iwerks was the lead animator, even the only animator, on the earliest Mickey cartoons. It’s safe to assume that Ub also designed the original Mickey. This PDF about “Steamboat Willie” at the Library of Congress was written by the late Dave Smith, who was Disney’s first archivist.

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/steamboat_willie.pdf

After years of Congress bending to Disney’s demands to extend the “Steamboat Willie” copyright, as of January 1 it will finally be in the Public Domain.

Martin Landau was a cartoonist at The New York Daily News before deciding on a career switch to acting.

Landau played James Mason’s assistant in Alfred Hitchcock’s infinitely re-watchable North by Northwest. Warners has generously made the first ten delightful minutes of the movie available. Look for Robert Shayne, who was Inspector Henderson in The Adventures of Superman.

Doreen Lang played Cary Grant’s secretary Maggie. She is also in Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man from a few years earlier.

Hitchcock and Landau during the filming of North by Northwest.

Hitch, being something of a cartoonist himself, drew the famous self-portrait he used in the opening of his TV anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Bugs Bunny in a very atypical, compromised position.