Category: Cartooning

A few postings ago, a little man in a cameo movie appearance was identified as Arthur Q. Bryan. He was a popular voice on radio, mostly in the 40’s, but thanks to TV he’s best remembered today as the voice of cartoon character Elmer Fudd.

For a brief time, director Bob Clampett made Fudd look like Lou Costello, but then wisely returned to Tex Avery’s previous design, patterning Fudd more after Arthur Q. Bryan himself.

Bryan is shown in this photo with Artie Auerbach, who is playing Father Time, in a publicity photo for the Al Pearce Radio Gang show. Pearce was very popular in his day, but now seems to be largely forgotten.

I agree with Arlo’s sentiment here…

Watch this 30-second clip from a movie that was recently shown on Turner Classic Movies. Can you name the character actor who punches “Santa”? Who’s playing Santa?

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/2012/PunchSanta.flv 400 300]

New Yorker cartoonist J.B. Handelsman has died at 85. Like a lot of artists and cartoonists whose eyesight holds up, he worked pretty much up to the end. He wasn’t a favorite of mine, but anybody with staying power at The New Yorker must be respected.

Here’s a mini-gallery of Handelsman cartoons from 1965-1970. Click to enlarge. I picked those years because Handelsman seemed conservative, and that was a time of great upheaval. I consider these to be the best of the bunch, and I’ll be honest and say that compared to other New Yorker cartoons, I don’t think they hold up very well. Handelsman’s humor could be dry to the point of being banal, even when insightful.

© The New Yorker

A couple of posts ago I asserted that some of the Popeye cartoons from the 40’s and 50’s seem to have a sadistic bent. One thing I’ve noticed they have in common is they were directed by Max Fleischer’s son-in-law, Seymour Kneitel. Here’s another example of sadistic brutality that I recall from childhood.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUN07/PopeyeSuperman.flv 400 300]

“She-Sick Sailors” is from 1944, the year after the last Superman cartoon had been produced by the Fleischer/Famous studio. Note how the Superman “S” emblem is quickly dropped to simplify the animation work. The cartoon features a scene where Bluto challenges Popeye to shoot him with a machine gun, and to let him shoot Popeye in return. When I was a kid I was really bothered by this sequence, and now I realize why.

Unlike the black & white Fleischer cartoons, Bluto was no longer Popeye’s rival for Olive. Instead, he had become a truly evil villain. He intended to cut Popeye to ribbons with the machine gun, then assault and murder Olive. Unreal cartoon violence this isn’t. Perhaps it was an attempt at returning to the Perils of Pauline of the silent movie days, but I now think there’s more psychology behind these flashes of cruelty than just an interest in creating suspense and to entertain.