Animation Artifacts &Story & Storyboards &UPA 04 Jun 2007 07:35 am
OomPahs Storyboard
- I’ve long been a fan of T.Hee‘s work. I think I’ve said that before. When I saw some pages on ebay of the storyboard for The OomPahs, I had to buy them (at a not too expensive price.)
The short was a 1952 UPA film directed by Bobe Cannon. The film’s music score was by Ray Sherman who worked with Ben Pollack’s group, the “Pick-a-rib Boys.”
T. Hee shared the design of the film with Jules Engel who did color work, and the animation was by Roger Daley, Bill Melendez and Frank Smith.
The film is not one of my favorite UPA shorts. I find the style interesting but the story (which to me seems to be a variation of Warner’s I Love To Singa, which was a take on Jolson’s Jazz Singer) is a jazz vs classical music riff. The film seems to talk down to its audience a bit. This was a frequent problem with a number of the UPA films. I find Marvin Miller’s voiceover to be the biggest difficulty in this regard. The voiceover tracks rarely live up to the graphics – though I think the music choices are usually brilliant, despite the low budgets the composers had.
The pages I have obviously are not consecutive in number, but they’re a good sampling.
The first of the pages is a rough version of the second. It’s interesting to see how little varied they are. They are all drawn lightly (I had to darken the linework a slight bit in photoshop), but the rough is even lighter.
1 
2
#1 is a rough version of #2. Both are page 13.
3 
4
#3 is a final of pg. 19 & #4 is a final of page 20.
5
# is a final of pg. 23.
To see a couple of layout drawings for this short, from Hans Walther‘s collection, go to site here and here.
on 04 Jun 2007 at 3:09 pm 1.Rich Dannys said …
I remember seeing & grabbing these JPEGs, myself.. They’re pretty amazing, in my opinion.. I didn’t bid on any of it. But really enjoyed seeing all of the T.Hee material, that I didn’t know existed.. Including the “Robbin Hood” storyboards & the Baseball gag cartoons.. His stuff was flat-out funny. And he certainly had a knack for terrific character Posing & Staging!
– Rich
on 04 Jun 2007 at 5:59 pm 2.Rusty Mills said …
If you like T. Hee you can see some instructional drawings of his on my blog that he did while I was a student of his. They are almost at the bottom of the page.
on 22 Apr 2013 at 5:26 pm 3.Martina said …
Hi, I can’t understand all the names of Orville’s friends, could you perhaps help me? I’m working on subtitles… Thanks, Martina
on 22 Apr 2013 at 6:41 pm 4.Michael said …
Hi Martina, I’m not sure what names you don’t get. All the names I see include: Orville, Oompapa, Oomama, and Doc Oboe.
Anything I’m missing?
on 23 Apr 2013 at 6:40 am 5.Martina said …
He Michael, I meant his friends from the playground, the street kids he improvises with… M.