Animation Artifacts 14 Dec 2007 08:46 am
Guilty Greek Pleasures
– Mark Mayerson started it. He posted a well-deserved praise for the dvd collections that have been released by Steve Stanchfield through his Thunderbean Animation.
Steve’s been doing a fabulous job of packaging some great shorts that would certainly be otherwise ignored. His Cubby Bear dvd is outstanding. Harman-Ising did several of these films immediately after leaving the Schlesinger studio, just prior to taking over MGM. Without Steve’s dedication, they’d be all but invisible in the home market.
Mark’s comments focused on the new Little King collection from Thunderbean. Otto Soglow‘s silent comic strip character was nicely adapted to animation via the Van Beuren studio, and the results are well collected here.
I have an interest in the work done at this New York studio that I think is more than just nostalgic. Amadee Van Beuren was one of the founders of the Fables Corporation and ultimately bought out the other investors after already setting up the Van Beuren Corporation in 1928. He rolled Fables Corp into Van Beuren and fired a number of its employess including Paul Terry and Frank Moser (They ended up forming a company that became known as Paul Terry-toons.) Van Beuren was able to get a theatrical release for his shorts via RKO.
The principal product was a series of Tom and Jerry cartoons. Not the cat & mouse but the tall & short guys. These weren’t very successful, so by 1933, there was a series of Amos and Andy cartoons. Adapted from the radio show by Gosden and Correll, the series suffered when the creators couldn’t come up with enough material to keep the shorts in production. The Little King series wasn’t well received, and RKO looked for a way to ramp up Amadee Van Beuren’s decision making. They needed stars.
Burt Gillette originally came from New York, went to work for Disney directing some of their great shorts – including The Three Little Pigs and Flowers and Trees before 
ending up at Van Beuren directing the studio. Mark Mayerson records a good summary of his career.
A number of other important animation personnel passed through the studio on the way to something bigger. Jack Zander, Joe Barbera, Carl Urbano, Bill Littlejohn, Johnny Gentilella, Izzy Klein, Tom Palmer, Frank Tashlin, Pete Burness, Marty Taras, Dan Gordon and Shamus Culhane all had short stays.
The company had no real star to feature in their shorts. They offered Molly Moo Cow in a couple of amiable but not great films; the Toonerville Trolley travelled in from the comic strips with a couple of successful films; Felix the Cat was reworked and bastardized for a limited couple of shorts. There was also a series set in “Parrotville,” and an odder group of cartoons you’ll be hard pressed to find.
The failed shorts that wholly grabbed my interest, when I was younger, was the start of a series they did featuring characters from Greek and Roman mythology. It never got very far; they did only two of them.
It’s A Greek Life (1936) starred a shoe repairing centaur, two ducks and Mercury who comes to get his winged shoes repaired. Oddly, a film called “The Greek Life” has a group of characters with clichéd Italian accents. The film was directed by Dan Gordon. Winston Sharples was obviously going to move from here to become Paramount’s in-house animation composer.
Here are some frame grabs:
You can watch a podcast of this short on-line at The Animation Station.
Another short, Cupid Always Gets His Man, directed by Gilette and Tom Palmer, features a training depot and way station for Cupids out to get their “Man”. In this case is a caricature of W.C.Fields and Edna Mae Oliver (not as well drawn as the Disney caricatures in Mickey’s Gala Premier also directed by Gillette.)
On DVD they’re part of Cartoons That Time Forgot from Image.
For those of you who enjoy reading the third string movie reviewers of your local newspapers, today’s a good day. Someone had to review Alvin and the Chipmunks.
In New York the NYDaily News had Elizabeth Weitzman:
“‘Chipmunks’ drive us to rodent rage”
the NYTimes had Andy Webster:
“Hollywood continues its tired milking of old television properties with “Alvin and the Chipmunksâ€
First stringer, Lou Leminick, of the NYPost said:
UPDATED ALVIN A GYP-MUNK
“For adults, it’s like being hit over the head with a mallet every 10 seconds for 90 minutes. Two days later, I still had a headache.”
on 14 Dec 2007 at 5:30 pm 1.Eddie Fitzgerald said …
Wow! I’d like to see these cartoons! Van Beuren was an under-rated studio in some respects. The best of their stuff was nice and caroony and full of imagination.
It’s a shame that everyone became obsessed with the star system. Stars limit what you can do and you have to spend too much time building up their characters. In my own work I feel very comfortable with the star system, because it fits the way I think, but I’ve always been grateful that other people were working outside of it. When they get a good idea they can nail it in it’s pure form, without adapting it to some other set of rules. It seems to me that a healthy industry would contain both types.