Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- Our Adventures in Music continue with the preliminary storyboard for what would ultimately become Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom. This is another board on loan from the archives of John Canemaker, and you can see the outgrowth from the prior film, Melody: Adventures in Music.

You can see how little of the magic was in this board, yet it obviously inspired others to keep it alive and make it work. Ward Kimball has to get most of the credit, though designs by Tom Oreb, Ken O’Connor, Eyvind Earle and Victor Haboush sure brought it to life.

The material I’m posting here is on large photostat copies. The problem is that the images are a bit fuzzy, and the text beneath the boards is illegible. In some cases, the appropriate text has been hand written on the copies themselves.

1

2

(Click any image to enlarge.)

4

5

These are breakdowns of each row of the boards so that the images can be made as large as possible. Each row of images is split in two and labelled accordingly. #31a means Board 3 row 1 part a.

11a

11b

12a

12b

13a

13b

14a

14b

15a

15b

21a

21b

22a

22b

23a

23b

24a

24b

25a

25b

31a

31b

32a

32b

33a

33b

34a

34b

35a
Finally, something familiar.

35b

Ward Jenkins has posted some beautiful frame grabs from the completed film. Go here.

See this short on YouTube here.

John Canemaker deserves all the kudos he gets for lending this material to me as well as plenty more that he’s loaned this blog.

- I love shots of animation people at various functions. It’s particular fun when you know the people and the pictures show them from a different time and place. Here are a few that nicely fill the bill.

- Ralph Bakshi was in touch after seeing the Fleischer model sheets that I posted. He sent me a photo from the early 1960s.

(L to R) Al Chiarito, Vinny Bell, Arnie Levy, Nick Alberti, Bill Ackerman

Candy Kugel had a couple of other photos from two events. The first two are from a Lcl 841 u-nion meeting. Candy and I tried to ID the people in the photos, and we’ve named a number of them. If you notice an error or can name some others, please just drop a note in the comments.

(L to R) Cliff “Red” Augustin, unknown, Izzie Klein,
Marsha Kaplan (seated), Johnny Gentilella, Gordon Whittier,
female center unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown,
unknown woman seated, Nick Tafuri

Johnny Gentilella (L), unknown fem, Pepe Ruiz,
unknown, unknown, Gordon Whittier, Unknown fem.

Other photos are from an exhibition of animation art and screenings from the different commercial studios in NYC. This was held in April 1952.

Pauk Kim was the artistic designer of the exhibition.

This is Lu Guarnier in front of a sign which lists
all the studios at the time that participated in the
exhibit of cels and artwork – and a screening of spots.

Rose Eng (?), Anne Eng (Fred’s wife), unknown visitor, Fred Eng

Francis Lee

Pablo Ferro

Lu Guarnier

And at the very same time these animators were being
photographed at the animation function, I was holding up
my twin brothers and older sister dressed in my cowboy garb.

Among Candy’s photos was this one of an inbetweeener,
Fred Diamond, at his desk in Famous Studios. I thought
it interesting to see what the setup looked like at Famous.

Finally here’s a picture of Assistant Animator, Gerry Dvorak, who painted baseball cards in his early days, then went into pictures of snow leopards.

This is Gerry posing with Mickey Mantle at Mantle’s hotel room.
They’re holding up Gerry’s baseball card painting of Mantle.
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