Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

This is a recap of some photos that are worth viewing again. This was originally posted November 12, 2006.

- Having recently pored over some of the artwork from Raggedy Ann & Andy (the NY contingent of the 1977 feature film), I wondered if I had any photos that I could post. There weren’t many that I could find quickly, but the few I did find are here.

The first two stills were taken for the John Canemaker book, “The Animated Raggedy Ann & Andy.” I think only one of the two appears in the book.

(Click any image to enlarge.)
Obviously, that’s Dick Williams with me looking over his shoulder. Oddly I remember being in this position often during the film. It’s probably the first image I have of the production when I look back on it. Dick and I had a lot of conversations (about the film) with him “going” and me listening.

When I did actually grab time to do some drawing, this is my desk. It sat in a corner of a room – across from Jim Logan and Judy Levitow. There were about ten other assistants in my room, and there were about seven rooms filled with assistants on the floor. I had to spend time going through all of them making sure everybody was happy.

This slightly out of focus picture shows Dick Williams (R) talking with Kevin Petrilak (L) and Tom Sito. That’s Lester Pegues Jr. in the background. Boy were we young then!
These guys were in the “taffy pit,” meaning they spent most of their time assisting Emery Hawkins who animated the bulk of the sequence. Toward the end of the film, lots of other animators got thrown into the nightmarish sequence to try to help finish it. Once Emery’s art finished, I think the heart swoops out of that section of the film.

This photo isn’t from Raggedy Ann & Andy, but it just might have been. That’s the brilliant checker, Judy Price showing me the mechanics that don’t work on a scene on R.O.Blechman‘s Simple Gifts. This is the one-hour PBS special that I supervised after my Raggedy years. However, Judy was a principal on Raggedy Ann, and we spent a lot of time together.
Ida Greenberg was the Supervisor of all of Raggedy Ann’s Ink & Paint and Checking. She and I worked together on quite a few productions. I pulled her onto any films I worked on after Raggedy Ann. She was a dynamo and a good person to have backing you up.
I’m sorry I don’t have a photo of her from that period.

This is one of my favorite photos. Me (L), Jim Logan, Tom Sito (R). Jim was the first assistant hired after me – I’m not sure I was an assistant animator when they hired me, but I was being geared for something. The two of us built the studio up from scratch. We figured out how to get the desks, build the dividers, set up the rooms and order the equipment.
To top it all, Jim kept me laughing for the entire time I was there. I can’t think of too many others I clicked with on an animation production as I did with him. He made me look forward to going into work every day.
We frequently had lunch out, he and I, and I think this is at one of those lunches when Tom joined us. It looks to me like the chinese restaurant next door to the building on 45th Street. Often enough, Jim and I would just go there for a happy hour cocktail before leaving for the night.

I should have realized how important that period was for me and have taken more pictures. Oh well.

– Not too long ago, Paul Spector and I had an email conversation about his father, Irv Spector.

Irv was an animator that I knew periferally in New York during my first days in animation. We saw each otherat Union Meetings and some animation events in New York, but I didn’t really know about his start and key days in the business.

I jumped at the chance to ask Paul to share anything, anytime with this blog, and I’m pleased and excited to post this first entry from him.
__(Click any image to enlarge it.)

In 1941, during WWII, my father was an animator at Flesicher Studios in Miami, FL. At the the time, many cartoonists were being drafted into, or enlisting in, the miltary. Knowing he would soon be one of them he left Florida and drove across the country back to Los Angeles — where he was already registered for the draft — to push up his induction. (He began his career in LA at Mintz and Schlesinger, before taking a job with Fleischer when they were still located in New York).

Like a lot of other cartoonists my dad was assigned to the animation unit of the Signal Corp, making training films and other industrials; in his case back at the east coast unit.

In this photograph, my father is second from the right.

While many of these films incorporated animation as well as live action and photography it was not just those in the animation field who worked in the Corp. Although those of us with an interest in the animation field tend to focus in on that aspect, the Corp also produced pamphlets and manuals, etc. One of these non-animation inductees was Sam Cobean whose illustrations appear in many of the images below. Some of the most striking are done by him. A quick note about Cobean: during the war he was taken under the wing of The New Yorker magazine cartoonist-extradinaire Charles Addams, who introduced him to the editors at the magazine. Cobean soon began publishing there, and his star rose quickly through the post-war years until he was tragically killed in an automobile accident in 1951. The majority of those below came out of a manila envelope with “Sam Cobean, Bob Perry, Others” written on it. Several others were from untitled envelopes. Very few are signed by the artists, although you’ll notice several that are, especially two straighter drawings by the magnificient Lars Colonius. However, the vast remainder are pretty much gags and caricatures. Mostly funny, ludicrous, or just really nice to look at.

Some poke fun at army life, but most of all they lampoon my dad, who appears in almost all of them along with a cast of other cartoonists in the unit. (But whose else would I have? Naturally, about 98% of what I have is his work. This is the other 2%). The joke in some of these is that my father began to lift weights in the army, hence the drawings where he is muscled, or the mention of “Spector’s Health Roof”, or referred to as Simian(!) Here is are some real photographs of my dad in those years, so you can get a fix of what he really looked like then. Make sure you scroll down, and maybe someone out there can identify the three other gents in the image of them sitting along a wall (my father is second from right, with his eyes closed.)

Irv Spector

I’ll leave it up to all of you to try and identify anyone depicted throughout. One who is obvious to me is animator Herman Cohen, a longtime friend of my dad’s and our family in general. Here are some photographs on him — that’s his wife Juliet sitting on his lap.

An anecdote about Herm: In the mid-late 1960s, Herm and one of his sons, and my dad and myself, were shooting pool at our house. On one of Herm’s turns, we watched him take his cue stick and line it up by the 1-ball, sizing up angles. However, when it was time to take the shot, he actually hit the 1-ball with his cue — as if it were the cueball — to sink another ball. A moment later my dad says, “Hey, I forgot all about it. Herman is color blind!” Yep, Herm mistook the solid yellow 1-ball as the cueball. Just goes to show there’s hope that you too can have a lifetime career as a respected animator without being able to identify colors.

(Here are a few more of Irv’s caricatures of the period.
None of them have any background info on them.
If you can ID any of the people, please feel free to comment. MS)

Health Roof

(R) Veronica Spector – (L) Edmond Kohn

For the historians out there: There seems to be a dearth of information on the internet regarding the Signal Corp Animation Unit, east coast and west. If it helps, I’ve pieced together some of my father’s own moving around — date-wise, using some of the mail he received during this time. Maybe this info can be extrapolated…I dunno, but perhaps it can help.

April 1942: Bob Givens (also in the service) writes him at Ft. Monmouth, NY (from Ohio).
August 1942: Givens writes him c/o of the Signal Corp Animation Unit at Long Island City, NY (no return address).
September 1942: Jack Rabin (just about to be inducted) writes to him at the Training Publications Dept. of the Anti Aircraft School, Camera Crew Unit #1, at Camp Davis, NC.
July 1943: Written to at the Signal Corp Photographic Center on E.32nd St., NYC, NY.
Jan/Feb, 1944: Carmen Eletto writes to him, again at the Signal Corp Photographic Center on E.32nd St., NYC, NY.

Here’s an undated item from the TAG blog. Givens is in it, at Ft. Monmouth. So, pre-April ’42 maybe? Before he was shipped out to Ohio, of all places.

More images will follow on Friday.

- Public stauary in New York City is much like trees. Within the many parks, there are lots of trees as well as statues; outside of the parks, the trees are less obvious as are the statues. However, there are still many.

Outside the park the sculpture is a bit more modern and often abstract. Let’s move from one to the other.

This statue of Garibaldi is typical of the many statues from the early 20th Century that depict somewhat realistic images of heroic and public types. There’s usually an attempt to make the people a bit larger than life. Some of these are more daring and/or dynamic than others.
Garibaldi sits in NYU’s Washington Square Park, downtown, and has an important place within that park.
_____(Click any image to enlarge.)

Giovanni Turini’s statue was made for an Italian American organization
and donated to the park in 1888. It has developed a handsome patina which
allows it to nestle in among the beautiful summer greens around it.

Just outside of Washingon Square Park there’s a mall of a street
filled with small shops and restaurants, LaGuardia Place. Among and
in front of theses shopos is a statue of Fiorella LaGuardia, the mayor of
New York from 1934 to 1945. The statue is by sculptor Neil Estern.

All I really know about LaGuardia was that he read the Hearst comic strips,
“Puck, the comic weekly,” on Sundays over the radio. An odd little fact that
Chuck McCann told us in his weekly Sunday kiddee show in NY during the 60′s.

In a very small park off Sixth Ave. and Bleecker St., called
Winston Churchill Square, there’s there’s this armillary on a pedestal
centered in among park benches and greenery.

The park was designed by George Vellonakis.
He may have designed the sculpture.

What looks like a more abstract version of an armillary sphere sits among
the buildings of NYU. Here are two views from both front and back.

I haven’t been able to name the sculptor as yet.

These sculptures are all within six city blocks of my studio.
There are thousands more in New York, and I’ll post more soon.

- There was a short article in the New Yorker recently about someone in New York who had a shark tank in a window which was visible to pedestrians from the street. This had me wonder about windows and how much we could see within windows from the street. Generally, speaking.

The answer is not very much, and I actually wondered about that shark tank. I’d thought about this subject before this point. Standing at a bus stop on 30th Street and Park Avenue, one could look into a picture window I’d seen quite a few times. I was never quite sure whether it was an office or an apartment, and in all the years I’ve gazed into that window, I haven’t seen any people. Nor have I seen the interesting furniture moved about. The place looks like what one might think an old time editor’s office would look like. This makes me think it’s probably a living loft for someone.

For the most part there’s an enormous glare coming off windows and, fortunately for the sake of privacy, we can’t see very much of the interiors of these apartments. However there are all sorts of windows out there and they all look very different while, in another sense, they all look the same.

I suppose we can blame housing regulations for this. In the not too distant past, the City dictated that all landlords would be responsible for making windows energy efficient. There seems to be only one brand of window that fits this category (at least they all look alike – except for color) and almost all windows seem to have filled this bill.

To the left an older wood style window that isn’t very energy efficient
and is in the extreme minority among windows.
The right shows a newer casing that has been given some small sense of design.
This isn’t generally what you see.

The standard is less attractive from outside. Whether they move up and down (L)
or slide left and right (R) they’re not very pleasing, aesthetically speaking.

Many windows depend on the tenant to dress them up with plants and such (L),
however some older buildings have attractive lintels that
merge with these newer casings (R).

French shutters (that don’t seem to close – they’re just for dressing)
helps hide the standardized casings.

There are some attractive variations such as
the french style window that opens inward (L)
or the casing can open outward (R) – a bit less interestingly.

There’s also the shape of the window. I imagine these are much harder to
maintain or replace. I’m also not sure the casing is energy efficient.
But they sure are pretty.

Similar type windows appear midtown, but they’re probably more likely office windows.

Of course, in the older midtown office buildings there are plenty of attractive windows
that have been well maintained (despite the signage.)

There are also plenty of ugly windows even though the building, itself, was
obviously attractive at one time. Disrepair has set in like an old subway station.

I’d hoped to find that shark tank from the street level, as the New Yorker article
suggested, but it’s not quite that obvous to the pedestrian. I couldn’t find it.
I did find this house in construction (or is it deconstruction?).
Perhaps, the shark got loose and ate his way out of the building?

- Walking up Bleecker Street (a block away from my studio) at 6am recently, I noticed a truck putting up the “Welcome to Greenwich Village” sign.

This sign is a mainstay of the Christmas decorations that don’t go up until October, so I was curious what it was all about. I assumed it had to do with tourists and Greenwich Village and summer.

I snapped a couple of photos and went onto work.
_________(Click any image to enlarge.)

You can see that the Christmas star is attached to the “wreath”-like banner.
Despite this people walk around in summer attire.

Then, yesterday morning at 7am I walked into the scene of people raising tents.

Workers are busy constructing their tents, working out of vans and trucks, busily building a small market which runs about four or five street blocks (about a ¼ of a mile.)

Here’s a scene at 7am and again at 11am after things have opened.

This is what Bleecker Street looks like from the other side of 6th Avenue.

All summer long, New York becomes littered with street fairs and festivals.
Automobiles travel an obstacle course through the city trying to move in and around
these outdoor markets.

All sorts of food is the main attraction from crepes to gyros . . .

from thai food to . . . thai food.

All this fresh fruit will add up to a lot of smoothies.
Anything that can be carried and eaten can be sold.

Clothing amounts to baseball shirts (where else will you find
Mets & Yankees side-by-side), scarves, belts or wallets.
Local stores join in by setting up a table and a tent
to sell samples of their merchandise.

Interestingly enough, I noticed last night that there was another one of these little market/festivals about five city blocks away. On the other side of Sixth Avenue at 8th Street (actually it’s Greenwich St.) another group of tents were selling happily.

Just so you don’t miss the current cartoon Barry Blitt (the cartoonist who did the famed New Yorker cover) printed in the NYTimes to illustrate Frank Rich ‘s Sunday column, I thought I’d post it (above). I hope McCain isn’t trying to navigate around the street fairs of New York.

- Back in the wild, wild west, they used to have hitching posts so cowboys could tie their horses outside the local tavern to keep them from running wild. If there was no hitching post, cowboys in movies used the stanchions in front of the saloon or store.

We don’t have horses in the big city, but we do have bicycles. Hitching these with chains and locks and anything to try to prevent theft has
________(Click any image to enlarge.)_____________been a primary difficulty for
_______________________________________-_____messengers and other bike riders.

My studio has two entrances (or exits depending on how you view the situation.) At both, there are wrought iron fences which sort of act as bannisters going up/down the steps. Leaving work the other day, I noticed that the back entrance was used as a “hitching post” for a couple of bike riders. Presumably they were working out in the gym just next door.

Good thing we rarely use this exit.

This made me start looking at other hitching posts I could find on my way home, and I took some snaps.

Sign posts and trees seem to be likely candidates.

Sometimes both come in handy.

Though, any pole will do.

The upside-down “U” seems to be designed for smaller businesses
that want something curbside.

For one or multiple bikes.

There’s also the “M” shape for a couple of bikes.

I’m not sure if these are supplied by the City or the storeowner.
There’s a uniformity around town that makes me wonder.

In places there are a number of these for the high bike traffic.

Sometimes this isn’t enough and a subway entrance serves as a backup.

Even though many “M”s have been placed in the same area.

I did like noting this one unit outside a “Circuit City” store that offered
an overhead to protect the bikes outdoors.

- Last week, I posted a bit about the enduring verve of the green foliage bursting through the cold, hard concrete of New York’s streets. These were accidental growths, weeds that blossomed in the cracks of the ground. This led me to think about the greening of the city, the foliage that was planted for all of us to enjoy. Perhaps not “Palms,” but trees just the same.

New York City, throughout all five boroughs, has planted many a tree to line the streets. Actually, the nearer you get to a park area, it seems, the more you’ll see planted trees.

They come in all sizes and shapes and have many varied rooted plantings. To the left, we see what I believe is the most typical type. A square of concrete has been replaced by soil, and the trees are planted to continue growing out of it. These trees, just outside Madison Square Park, are young and recently planted.

A couple of years ago the city was hard hit with a Gypsy Moth infestation that attacked most of the trees. The City had to kill off all the trees that had the pestilence and replant newer trees which were healthy and free of harmful insects.

The tree on the left seems to have no above ground space for growth.
The roots lie completely under the concrete.
The tree on the right is very typical. It shares space
with parking meters and garbage waiting pickup.

Here, on the left, we see trees that are brand, spanking new.
They’re wrapped at the bottom to protect the bases and to give them
time to adjust to the environment.
The tree on the right has a small fence to protect it from dogs.
These fences are usually placed by Block Associations.

Park Avenue has trees in the centerpiece running all the way up and down town.
It’s interesting to see the Park Dept. truck come through to spray the trees on the go.

Large numbers of planted trees are potted. These are usually bought and placed by local establishments wanting to decorate the fronts of their stores. Most often these are restaurants, like the Korean Restaurant above left.
The three planted, small trees above right decorate the front of
a local Catholic Portuguese Church.

Here’s a closer look at the attractive flowers planted at the base of these trees.

At one time there were three trees in these three barrels.
I guess they’re having a hard time of it in front of this cafeteria/restaurant.

These planters hold smaller shrubs that decorate two different restaurants
a block away from each other.

This funeral home has planted a couple of similar type of shrub.

A newer local restaurant offers these specially built boxes full of flowers.

Another, fancier restaurant offers several different types of planter and plant.

There were quite a few plants and tree displayed to soften the city view. It’s something that I generally take for granted. Regardless of whether the City is planting trees or local establishments, I have to admit it makes the world a more pleasant place for me.

- There was an excellent documentary on PBS this past Thursday. It was called, “Home.” Perhaps it was just local channel 13/WNET that aired it. The show was a documentary about New York from the vantage point of outsiders who’d moved here. The director, Alan Cooke, interviewed lots of celebrity types; Frank McCourt, Liam Neeson, Alfred Molina, Rosie Perez, Mike Myers, Colin Quinn, Susan Sarandon and Woody Allen offered choice comments throughout the show.

Malachy McCourt, at one point, said that the City was cold and difficult. Even the sidewalks were cold, hard concrete. Yet in these sidewalks there were always cracks with bits of life shooting up from the least likely places.

Wall-E offers a world of no vegetation, and we have to accept that premise. Yet, reality shows us that nothing can stop the bits of green from stopping in the coldest of extreme. George Carlin once said that styrofoam was not going to destroy life on earth. It was just going to stop HUMAN life on earth. He speculated that perhaps humans were put here specifically to invent styrofoam so that the earth could continue after all humans died off using styrofoam for whatever it needed. Even the devestated Hiroshima and Nagasaki have already recovered from the nuclear onslaught some sixty years ago. Grass grows there.

Here are bits of grass, life and plants creeping out from the least likely places.

(Click any image to enlarge.)______________

To me, it’s more likely that 700 years after the humans left earth,
the planet would have looked more like the photos below.

Madison Square Park is looking gorgous these days.

- As you may have noticed in past photo pieces, I have an interest in signage. I’m a type freak, so I look at type all the time and read everything in my eye’s path. As such, I’ve always had a fascination for hand painted signs that look as though they’d been printed. Generally, they’re indistinguishable from the traditional poster.

This sign for The Incredible Hulk recently appeared in the Village at
Houston and 6th Ave. It looks like any other Hulk poster around town.

(Click any image to enlarge.)

However getting closer you get to realize that someone had hand painted this
on a brick wall. One wouldn’t have been able to paste a poster.

Take a look at the type at the bottom of the sign.

The copyright type turns into blobs of paint.
I wonder if the copyright holder realizes that
this is what they were paying for.

Here’s another painted wall I found on line.
No story behind it that I can find, but it’s a great hand painted image.

Many of the posters in the Village aren’t hand painted; they’re screens that are bound to brick walls by wires.

You can see, in the closeup, that this sign is a screen.

This sign completely hides the small building behind it.
There don’t seem to be any windows being covered by the screen.

In these two closer shots you can see the hardware better.
Yes, it does say, “I love TOUS, Kylie Minogue.”

This sign for the Museum of Modern Art hangs over a playground area.

Up close, you can see that it’s a screen bound to the wall.

– Back when I was a kid, sleeping in the same room with my two brothers, we had on the wall a number of Disney characters.

These weren’t painted on the walls, they were some kind of pressed cardboard, about 3/4″
thick, cutout characters. They were brilliant, though. The grouping of cutouts, hung like picture frames, using nails, painted little scenes. Cinderella in her coach with all of the horses and coachmen, Dumbo flying with Timothy below him, or the Three Little Pigs and their varied houses with a lurking wolf. (The image to the left was found on line, but it’s not as well drawn as the images I saw daily back in the early 60′s.)

I recently received some pictures sent by Tom Hachtman. You may remember that he, the cartoonist friend who draws Gertrude’s Follies, works with his wife, Joey Epstein, as part of a group which paints murals on walls for people who commission such things. (See posts 1 or 2.)

Obviously, they’ve been hired to put a little Disney on a couple of walls. Tom sent me photos of the end results, and I’m inclined, obviously, to share them.

This is a long way from the pressed cardboard characters that floated over my bed. Times have changed – only a bit, though. This very same Bambi setup was one of the cardboard setups I looked at daily. A good image is a good image.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen the Fox and the Hound mixing with 101 Dalmatians
with Lady & the Tramp. A doggy park on the wall.

_____________(click any image to enlarge.)

- Artist and friend, Adrian Urquidez, pointed me to some older images of park benches. “Why park benches?” you ask. You may remember that I posted an entire group of photos of NY benches. He thought I’d find these illustrations of interest. I did and still do, and I thought it time to share. Here are some park benches of the past – they’re probably still in use in NYC parks.

These benches are found in Union Square, the park at 14th Street and Park Avenue. My post featured benches about 9 blocks away at Madison Square Park.

I think Adrian may have noticed that these benches also had dividers. I’d commented that I thought they were adding dividers to the new benches to stop vagrants from stretching out and sleeping on them.

There are no benches in this picture, but Adrian sent it, and why not include it?

- In the past, I’ve posted a number of photos from my friend, Steve Fisher. He’d sent me many other stills, but I never found the proper time or place to post them. So, this one fills the bill. The photos are too great to not share. Thanks Steve.

It kinda looks to me like a camel got stuck up in a tree.

One might wonder if there were elephants set free in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Balto? I don’t think so.

Another monumental shepherd.

No leash policy.