Animation Artifacts 12 May 2006 06:45 am
Culhane Continuity
My apologies for problems with this site these past three days. My webserver has been having all sorts of problems, and it’s seriously affecting my sites. Hopefully, we’re beyond that problem.
- Acting as a companion piece to Mark Mayerson‘s recent posts re Shamus Culhane‘s direction on The Pied Piper of Basin Street for Lantz in 1944, I am posting these drawings from the early spots Culhane directed for Ajax Cleanser.
As Culhane reports in his autobiography, the call came out of the blue in 1949 from an advertising agency offering these commercials which became enormously popular. Culhane formed a studio hiring Art Heinemann to design the three elves in the spot, and Art Babbitt teamed with Shamus to animate it. The ad campaign lasted until the late 1950′s.
(click on either image to enlarge.)
It’s interesting to see how varied the rough and the clean–up are from each other (they both are for the same number.) The clean-up is also obviously designed to be inked not xeroxed (which predates 1959).
I bought these drawings which while marked as animation drawings by Culhane, are probably not. The rough could possibly be his work, but I don’t think so.
It looks more like Emery Hawkins, but that’s not much more than a guess. The clean up looks like the work of Gerry Dvorak, but that’s also an educated guess. If anyone out there has a better idea, let me know.
I’m also sure that this spot ran in the mid 1950′s. I distinctly remember seeing it originally on tv when I was a child. To see one of the Ajax commercials go here to see a number of early tv spots.
