Animation Artifacts &Daily post 16 Jan 2007 09:25 am
I Can Smile at the Old Days
- Just to get myself in the spirit sometimes takes a bit of energy. I can sit down and start working, but I prefer to have the right frame of mind before I do anything to do with animation. This is especially and most importantly necessary when I’m doing a job for hire. I have the impetus and the motive, but the emotional framework has to be geared up and ready to go.
The animated shorts that make me smile most inside are the old B&W Mickey cartoons. I had a 16mm print of The Whoopee Party (1932), and I think I ran that thing a couple of hundred times for myself. I loved it. (Someday, now that I have the dvd, I’ll make a lot of frame grabs for my own amusement.)
Jungle Rhythm (1929) was another film I had that wasn’t quite as charming, but I ran it often enough. (This somehow reminded me of an early Tom and Jerry short I owned in 8mm. No, not the cat and mouse, but the short and tall guys from Van Buren cartoons.)
Now, if I want to get in the proper spirit, I can pull out a dvd and watch it on my tv or computer. But that somehow has a distance to it that 16mm didn’t. I like to feel the textures of the cartoons, and the dvds are too clean.
However, I do have these flash cards. They seem inspired by the spirit of Jungle Rhythms, though feel closer to the Mickey comic books I used to read. I put up a couple of these last March, and I thought I’d post some more. I’m in the mood for memorabilia. (You can thank Hans Perk for that – see below.)
(Click any image to enlarge.)
In response to my post yesterday, Hans Perk posted the postcard locked in my memory from about forty-odd years back. The card with all the framed portraits of Disney characters didn’t have “fifty” as I remembered but quite a bit fewer. It’s hilarious for me to see that piece of memorabilia again. What a thing this Internet is! Check it out.
on 16 Jan 2007 at 12:43 pm 1.Thad Komorowski said …
Those first two are definitley from the Floyd Gottfredson story “Mickey Mouse Sails for Treasure Island”.
From the 30s to late 40s, Gottfredson was thuh bomb! No other Mickey compared, IMHO.
on 16 Jan 2007 at 2:43 pm 2.Hans Perk said …
What was most surprising to me was that you mentioned the fan card not 15 hours after I purchased the same card, and handled it for the first time! Must have been a tremor in the Force!
By the way, I, too, received a bundle of fan cards in my “animation youth” in the mid/late 70s, most of them from “Public Relations/CR,” which turned out to be a nice lady called Connie Ropolo who handled the fan mail single-handedly. I only found that out a few years ago. Her husband Ed Ropolo was in the publicity department in 1963, while in 1971 he was situated in the Disney bungalow (accounting?). Connie was in “5C Cafe Annex” in 1971…
on 17 Jan 2007 at 11:14 am 3.Larry Ruppel said …
Actually, I count 42 different characters or actors on that postcard. So Mike, your memory’s not that far off!
Somewhere around here I’ve got a similar card sent to me during the “Robin Hood” era – I’ll look for it and get back to you if your interested.
on 17 Jan 2007 at 11:21 am 4.Michael said …
Of course I’m interested. These bits of memorabilia get me charged. Thanks, Larry.
on 17 Jan 2007 at 2:17 pm 5.Hans Perk said …
I have to correct myself: Ed Ropolo was producer – he co-produced the 70s New Mickey Mouse Club, and passed away shortly after that. As to the fan card with the frames, it was drawn by Bob Moore, who we know from lots of things, like the kids around Paul Wenzel’s Walt Disney head on the 6c 1968 stamp. Remember those? They were there because it was not allowed to have copyright notices on stamps – so they couldn’t use Mickey etc – and had to do generic characters.