The Republican and Democratic conventions have me worked up into a political frenzy. Given the patriotic fervor running through my blood, these days, it’s appropriate to post this Alex Toth sampler. There’s nothing more American than good cowboy stories, and Bill Peckmann has sent me just that. Over to Bill:
Alex Toth spent a large portion of his life in Hollywood and not only did he live there, he breathed it! Alex loved movies and like any good film director he was able to do comic book genre stories with the same great flair that a John Ford would bring to his different films.
Here are three ‘Western’ stories by Alex with each one going down somewhat of a different ‘Trail’.
The first one, ‘Anachronism’, was published in DC’s ‘Weird Western Tales’, # 14, Nov. 1972.
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Alex laid out this story horizontally, which makes for
some beautifully composed pages and panels, like a
well done Sunday funnies page of years ago. The readers
would have had to read the book sideways, I wonder how
Alex got away with that with the editors/publishers.
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I’ll separate the stories again with some of Alex’s ‘Doodles’.
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The story that follows is: ‘The Wings Of Jealous Gods’ from DC’s ‘Adventure Comics’, # 425, Jan. 1973.
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Here are more of the doodles Alex Toth did, these in pen.
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Here is the third Toth Western tale. It was a small booklet done for the Ralston-Purina Cereal Company in 1982.
It’s a story starring movie cowboy Tom Mix. (It must have taken Alex back to his childhood days of Saturday afternoon movie house matinees.)
There was hope of doing more, but as far as I know, this was the only one produced.
- This is my idea of heaven. This week in politics can only get better tonight. The Democratic convention is full of intelligent, smart speakers who are performing at their height. I spend my days waiting for the nights. Those speeches are just too delicious. How can my politics NOT slip over into this Splog!
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- The animated feature, Toys in the Attic, opens in theaters tomorrow, Sept. 7th. I’ve received a number of emails from the producers of this animated feature. It was done in the czech Republic and has been adapted for English Speaking audiences. The voices inlude Joan Cusack, Cary Elwes and Forest Whitaker in the English language version. The film was directed by Jiřà Bárta, who has done a number of other films which, like Toys in the Attic, are mixed media: 3D stop-motion mixes with 2D animation which mixes with pixillation and live action. It’s an attractive and exciting film which depends less on technology than on knowledge of the medium from filmmaking to animation.__________________Director, Jiřà Bárta
The stop-motion puppets are not of the Laica variety. There is no heavy financing behind them that they can create millions of facial movements that are replaceable so that any emotion can animate into another one. The animation is not quite as slick and, consequently, looks more hands-on.It’s very effectve, just the same. I think of Ray Harryhausen’s work which strobes and is awfully clunky in many parts, but it’s still grabbing in its emotional simplicity.
Weird bugs
The sets and costumes, the puppets and the mixed-in 2D animation all sing hand-made and very human. There’s an enormous attractiveness to this, and it’s all so creatively done. A character wals in front of a mirror; his reflection is a 2D version of himself. Trains pull in and out of stations and travel all across the attic. The smoke out of the train, the billowing steam from the engine. It’s all a linear 2D animation. Water floodsan area. The water is done using sheets of blue fabric moving forever forward animated as water even though it’s obviously made of cloth. Oh yes, 2D animated drops of water bounce around the cloth water. (It reminded me of Fellini’s Casanova (1976) when he went to the sea. The sea was made of large sheets of billowing black baggies. It’s obvious that it isn’t water, but somehow you bought the theatricality of it. Here, I bought the cloth running water, but I wonder if children will not be puzzled, or will their minds go with the flow of the director? I’d really like to know.)
The story is a simple one:Buttercup , a little doll with a penchant for housekeeping, is kidnapped. Lots of mechanical insects do the job for a living breathing statue/bust the color of a dark patina (a greenish-gray which includes his live action teeth). The bust seems to move in live-action (though it also appears to be animated in some odd way); maybe just part of it is live action, the rest pixillated. Buttercup’s friends, led by a wooden Don Quixote marionette (without strings), a teddy bear, and a mouse doll set out to save her.
The film is like a Svankmajer film for children. It’s more Eastern-European than the Quay Brothers and almost as surreal. Oddly, you sit there with your eyes glued to the screen as oddity after oddity moves forward. Desie the celebrity voices, I didn’t recognize one of them. They all wheeze and grunt and have accents. All their lines are partial sentences and short bursts. It’s quite original. I have to say that I never got emotionally invested in any of the characters. Sweet Buttercup is an old-time children’s doll who keeps house for others.
When she’s kidnapped, she’s thrown in a cell where she continues to sweep. Every once in a while, the captors pour ashes in on her from overhead. She’s covered with ashes and left in the pitch-black dark. Yet she continues to sweep. What else is there for her to do?
I probably felt more sympathy for the wooden Don Quixote. There seems to be a vulnerability in the old puppet event though the animation of the character isn’t overtly invested with any real character traits that I’d look for as an animator. It moves well but not with any
This film is certainly like nothing that would ever be made in Hollywood. William Joyce wants to do this but is too clean, airbrushed and slick; totally lacking in textured personality. The distributor calls Jiřà Bárta a Czech Tim Burton, but I can’t agree. Burton works in a style that pops out in your mind – you’d recognize the style that everyone tries to steal. Bárta’s style is much more surreal; it’s a play on reality not a stylization of it.
This is one curious movie that I enjoyed, but I’m not sure it’s for everyone’s taste. I wasn’t kidding when I dropped the Svankmajer name. There’s no doubt that Bárta has seen his work.
If you’ve seen the film please let me know what you thought.
I’d be curious to read your review.
- Going through a stack of boxes searching for genuine animation, one tends to find a number of gems that represent animation past but don’t nicely link to other pieces. The end result is that you hold a lot of odds and ends in your hands and you seek a way to post them. That’s certainly the case with Vinnie Cafarelli’s collected works.
I’ve located a lot of pieces that interest me, but I don’t necessarily know where they come from or why they were saved. So today I’m posting a number of these bits of art.
Here we have Layouts, cel setups, photos, models and more than a small share of invitations and Christ cards. Here they are:
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A Christmas Card from the NY-UPA Studio.
Many of the employees signed it.
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A guide to many of the names
of those who signed the card. (Click to enlarge)
I had a scanning problem on the upper
right and will try to correct that.
An invitation to a Christmas party at the Maysles Bros
studio. Certainly only for a member of the elite.
A Christmas Card from Fred Mogubgub.
A Christmas Card from the Goulding-Elliott-Graham Prods.
Ray Goulding and Bob Elliott, together with Ed Graham formed
this studio to do Piels commercials. (Bob Goulding & Ray Elliott were the
voices and held onto ownership of the characters. work dried up soon
since one commercial product & client couldn’t maintain the studio.)
A finished setup from a Yellow Pages commercial.
This was done at Gifford Productions.
Pablo Ferro during UPA days.
Vince Cafarelli (far left) while in the military at
Fort Benning, Ala. made extra money as a
bartender. These are the days just prior to his
workng at UPA.
A small racy sketch among the art.
We’re not sure who drew it but guess
it might be Vince Cafarelli’s work.
All that remains of a pitch for an antacid spot.
Obviously drawings 1 & 2 are missing, but
these two were interesting enough for me to post.
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A storyboard (3 pages) for a cigarette company
(Sportsman Cigarettes?). Obviously a sample board.
Is it a live action spot? Probably for Gifford Studio
which also did live action spots.
- Phil Duncan was a mainstay of the Hubley animators in all the time I was there. That was my good fortune. What a learning experience for a young animation student.
You could tell who Hubley’s favorite animators by the frequency in which he doled out sequences to them. Whereas Tissa David or Bill Littlejohn or Barrie Nelson would have been asked to animate entire shorts by themselves, someone like Phil Duncan would get whole sequences to animate. At the same time, John so depended on Phil and trusted what he did.
There were never pencil tests at the Hubley studio. Only one instance of it do I remember, and that was on the Art Babbitt mime scenes from Carousel. As I said once before, I remember John running out to get me asking if I’d like to see animation as good as I’d ever see. We then watched the PT over and over together. Ultimately John took Art’s animation on twos and had me put it on four frame dissolves to get more screen time out of it. A budget was a budget and you had to make the most out of the excellence you had in your hand.
But as I mentioned yesterday, Phil would animate on odd numbers expecting the even numbers to be inbetweened. Most times, John asked me to reexpose the scene on fours and not do the inbetweens. Of course, Phil was aware this would happen and had planned on it.
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Here is a walk cycle (and more) by Phil Duncan from Of Men and Demons, which was nominated for the Oscar in 1969. The full scene includes the three demons walking and then flying up to their cave.
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(Click any image to enlarge to full animation paper view.)
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The rest of the scene breaks out of the walk cycle. I
enlarged the frames to accomodate the remainder of the action.
– Years ago I worked at the Hubley studio on a pair of commercials for Vlasic pickles. One of the two spots made it to the air.
This is from the spot that never made it.
Vlasic had a commercial they wanted, and because of the agency’s long time relationship with the Hubleys, they came to him to try to develop the character. (The agency was W.B. Doner, the agency that had done so well with Hubley’s Maypo commercials.)
The agency came with two already-recorded voices: one was a Groucho Marx impersonator (Pat Harrington was the Groucho impersonator ultimately used for the stork’s voice.*) The other voice was character actor, Edgar Buchanan, a man with a gruff voice who appeared in a million westerns. John Hubley wanted Edgar Buchanan – it was a much richer voice, lots of cowboy appeal.
John designed the character to look like one of those stationmasters in cowboy films. The guy who gives out tickets and does morse code when he has to. The stork had a vest and a blue, boxy, stationmaster-type cap cocked off to the side. It was a great character.
Phil Duncan was the animator. A brilliant character guy who had done everything from Thumper to George of the Jungle. I loved cleaning up and inbetweening his work. It was all fun and vibrating with life.
The rough thumbnail drawing (above) fell out of one of Phil’s packages. It was a thumbnail plan of the action. Phil would do these things which usually stretched around the edges of his final drawings. In a nutshell, you could see the scene and how he worked it out. Lovely stuff.
I felt this drawing was as beautiful as the original animation drawings.
The agency approved the stork, Edgar Buchanan and the plan of action.
We’d already finished the first commercial which was on the air. (Represented by the two set-ups posted here.) The style was done with acrylic paints – out of a tube – on top of the cel. Ink with Sharpie on cel; paint dark colors – ON TOP of cel
- up to and over ink line; after drying we painted it again with lighter tones, and we pained it again after it dried using even lighter tones with a translucent color. Imagine kids & a gun in a spot today!)
Phil Duncan did a great job of animating it. I inbetweened, and the Agency loved it and approved it to color.
All this time, John and Faith were busy preparing the start of Everybody Rides the Carousel. It was to be three half-hour shows (Eventually CBS changed their mind and asked the shows, still in production, to be reconfigured to make a 90 min film) and was in preproduction. I did the spots on my own with John checking in. Faith wanted nothing to do with a commercial and was somewhat furious that a commercial was ongoing. She daily spoke out against this spot with many shouting matches. I never quite understood the problem. The spots didn’t hold up any other studio work; I was making it as easy as possible for John to not have to do much work on the spots, and they were getting necessary money to help finance some of the preliminary work for the Carousel. (Of course, the Hubley name was involved, but even Michelangelo did commercial work – like the Sistine Chapel to pay for the art. Not that Vlasic was the Sisine Chapel, of course.)
Within weeks the spot was in color and two junior exec. agency guys, John and I stood around the Hubley moviola. (It was a great machine with four sound heads and a picture head that was the size of a sheet of animation paper. Pegs were actually attached to enable rotoscoping!)
The two agency guys were buttoned up with good suits and briefcases. They stood behind John and me, and I operated the moviola.
We screened the spot the first time. I turned around and these two guys had come undone. Their ties were loose and astray; they were visibly sweating. I swear this all happened within the course of 30 secs.
John smiled and optimistically asked how they liked it. They looked at each other, and couldn’t answer. I don’t think they were able to form a decision or say what they actually thought. Eventually, they left with the spot in their briefcase and would get back. It wasn’t good.
They did get back. I was asked to pack up all the elements and ship them back to W.B. Doner. The spot was thrown out of the studio by John who refused to change it. (Hubley’s stork.)
He liked what was done, and apparently had
a rider in his contract which covered him – somehow.
The spot showed up at Jack Zander‘s studio, Zander’s Animation Parlour. They used the Groucho impersonation and slicked it up a lot. Vlasic is still using that stork, and that was John’s last commercial endeavor. The character is still showing up in a cg version, just as bad as the 2D version.
Steve Fisher returns from his Summer with the perfect picture for Labor Day 2012.
Tomorrow is Labor Day. The photo shows a flag which at its base is in focus and grows more and more wildly out of focus as it moves from that base. That’s the American political system at this point in 2012. In the most important speech of his life to-date, Paul Ryan, Vice Presidential candidate, lied openly. When confronted by the obvious lies on CNN, he admitted it, rode right over the lies, defending what he’d said even though there’s no truth there and no reality to it. The man rides on the border of the insane, convinced that he’s right, and having no proof of it, makes it up. Somehow this makes sense to him but not to those of us who prefer honesty. The old media (not the “liberal media”) report their findings to him and he merely mocks them. Their basinc discoveries are irrelevant to him. He wants only to dupe his base and capture other simpe minded folk ot there. We, the bigger audience, can only take it in and vote when it gets to be our turn.
Just the same . . . _______ . . . Happy Labor Day
By the way, Labor Day exists as a celebration of the Labor movement, meaning the U-nions. They are the enemy of the political right, and those on the right should stand by their principles and go to work. Or, at least, shut up while they take the day off from work with salary. There’ll be plenty of time tomorrow for more lies.
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Jones Doc to Air
- Tomorrow morning, at 10:15 am, Turner Classic Movies will air the Chuck Jones documentary, Chuck Jones: Memories of a Childhood. Undoubtedly, this is in conjunction with the Jones Centennial Celebration currently in progress. This film was directed by Peggy Stern, the producer who worked with John Canemaker on his Oscar winning film, The Moon and the Sun. Canemaker is a producer on this film.
It’s a 30 min film which will be followed by the Jones short, The Dot and the Line.
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Grim Writes About Tissa
Here’s an interview Tissa David did with her mentor, Grim Natwick, for Cartoonist Profiles magazine.
- As I recently wrote, John Canemaker and I are putting together a memorial for Tissa David. We have arranged to book a pretty large theater; we’ll ask specific speakers to talk about Tissa, and we’ll show several films and clips of Tissa’s brilliant art. At the moment we have no access to a space where we can have a wine and cheese offering, so come with plans to hook up with others if you want to go out afterward. If that should change I’ll let you know.
The event will take place on Tuesday, October 23rd at 7pm.
Until then, I’ll repost many of the Tissa pieces on Thursdays offering a lot of her drawings, interpretations of Hubley art and films she worked on otherwise. On Saturday posts I’ll bring you up to date on any further information about the event.
I’ll announce the place/the theater in a future post.
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Boing Boing
- I forgot to mention a couple of weeks back, the Splog made it to Boing Boing. In the earlier years I kept trying to get a mention on that site, but my fare never seemed to be what they were looking for. Eventually, I surrendered and stopped submitting posts.
Then I received an email from my friend, Mark Mayerson, congratulating me for making it. Wow!
I went to the link he gave me and found a YouTube transfer of one of my films there. This was a video I had made a million years ago (or maybe it was 1983) for a group I really enjoyed. Their song, Cavern, was long and sweet and minimalist, a movement I loved. (Give me Phillip Glass or early-John Adams over Chopin or Schumann any day of the week.)
The band, Liquid Liquid, was represented by 99 Records, a small record store in the Village. I went to the store and met with Ed Bahlman, the owner of the store and 99 Records. My offer was to do a music video. The agreement was that I could do what I wanted with no interference from anyone. We would jointly own the film. They could use it any time to promote the group, the song, the record company – in short anything to do with their company. I could use it however I wanted including all distribution rights that had nothing to do with the band.
I made the video. It’s an harangue against the unseen, daily bits of violence we all see in the world. Especially those who live in the city. Someone bumps into you on the street and keeps moving. Someone pushes you tight trying to get a subway seat. someone rushes to the front of the line in the supermarket oblivious to those who’ve waited. You know the stuff; the annoying bits of hurt people do while they listen to their I-phone, or while they’re texting and wouldn’t notice you even though you’re in their face. It’s my contention that these wee bits of violence ultimately turn into bigger, more hurtful turns. That’s where I aimed the video.
I wrote “video”, because that’s how I edited and finished the film. I wanted to teach myself how to use this new medium that was arising, and I edited at a major tape house in town. I was really into multiple and split screen film at the time, and I use this video to play with that. Lots of purposeful and planned repition on varied spli-screen setups. The band’s bassist, Richard McGuire, was always in touch, and I invited him to the edit, giving him a voice to make suggestions for the video. He came to the overnight session and we had a good time together pushing the piece to completion. Richard would later become a graphic designer, illustrator, and New Yorker cartoonist. He directed a segment of the French animation feature, Peur(s) du Noir.
The video quickly ended up on a couple of National, late night shows that broadcast new music videos. It also made its way to a few local shows. I sent it out to a small number of film festivals and had a modicum of success. It helped that the band was in a big law suit against a bigger group on a larger label. The contention was that the other group, Grand Master Flash, had stolen the group’s original riff. Liquid Liquid and 99 Records won that law suit and got some big PR. Of course, by that time the group had split up.
Terry Tolkin worked for 99 records. He would later become an Elektra Records vice president and No.6 Records label head. He was also my brother’s companion at the time. He helped in some of the early negotiating. Many years later, Terry contacted me asking if he could post the video on YouTube. (When we made the video there wasn’t much of an Internet, nevermind a YouTube.) I said sure, and it’s gotten a lot of hits (over 300 thousand.) The band has a big and well-deserved reputation. Terry put it up and a few years later Boing Boing noticed it.
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Toys
- Opening in theaters next Friday is a new animated feature. Toys In the Attic is a multimedia film combining 3D stop motion, 2D animation, pixillation and live action. The film stars the voices of Forest Whitaker, Joan Cusack and Cary Elwes in the English language version. The film was directed by Jiřà Bárta, an interesting director working in the Czech Republic. The film will be in theaters on Friday, September 7th. I’ll have a review of it on Thursday.
After the fall of the Czech Republic, Bárta had the difficulty of being stuck in a country in which he wasn’t allowed to release any of his films. Through the 1990′s he pushed to do an animated feature called Golem. The film never found its financing, but a short trailer was made of the work he did on it. The trailer is predominantly live action setting up the story of the Golem. Bárta works in a very detailed multimedia look. Live action is partially animated, stop motion animation moves into live action or 2D. He works similarly in Toys in the Attic, a film that looks very different from the simulated (meaning cg) cartoon puppets that usually grace our screens. It also looks very different than Golem. Toys In the Attic is a children’s film.
Golem – a trailer
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Mickey Speaks (on Camera)
- This week, Hans Perk posted the animation drafts for the Disney short Mr Mouse Takes a Trip on his blog, A Film LA. This might be enough, except he also adds a YouTube video of Walt Disney doing the voice acting alongside Billy Bletcher (as Pegleg Pete) for this film. The video is obviously an extra on one of the Mouse DVDs, but I seem to have missed it. Regardless, even if you know this video, it’s worth seeing it again. How different the process of recording these days.
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Bear that Wasn’t
- Bill Benzon, just a step away from completing his thesis on Dumbo, takes a short break/post to write about the Chuck Jones film/Frank Tashlin story, The Bear That Wasn’t . . ..
Using Mike Barrier‘s incisive interview with Tashlin, as his back up material, Bill writes with some authority on this peculiar film from the oddball combination of Jones & Tashlin. Brains don’t always mix with blood, and from my vantage point the film doesn’t quite make it, though it’s interesting to read Benzon’s take on the WB cartoon. Not surprisingly there are some thoughts as to the similarities with Dumbo in its story. “In both cases we have animals imagined as ‘floating’ somewhere around and about and in-between the world of machines and men. That bear is mistaken for a man who hasn’t been broken to Fordist harness. . . . . . . And Dumbo’s problem is to find a way he can fit into the circus world as a performer.” In the end, we hear the simple yet complex reason, in Tashlin’s own words, why and how the story was destroyed by Jones.
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Brown Out
- It was a bit sad for me to see that Nickelodeon executive, Brown Johnson, had been ousted from her job. (Here’s Variety‘s take on it.) She truly created an excellent model for a children’s television network and helped form it into a real challenger to Disney’s channels. Brown Johnson pushed with a lot of original animation programming. Nick’s Dora the Explorer was developed under Ms. Johnson’s leadership; likewise the breakout show, Blue’s Clues. True, Nick hasn’t been all that recently. Where Disney changed and went with a lot of tweenies live action series, Nick tried to follow suit but not with confidence. They weren’t successful with that strategy. They should have just concentrated on better shows. Animated ones.
I guess networks only know from firing proven execs and hiring new, young, exciting turks. The first show announced by her West Coast replacement, Russell Hicks, is the yet-again-reworked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Something tells me they haven’t found their way yet, and with a heavy dullard’s foot they plod forward with a loud thud.) Hopefully, Ms. Johnson will land elsewhere and bring her love of animation with her.
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Hubley Salute
- Finally, on Friday, Sept. 14th at 7:30pm the Motion Picture Academy will have a celebration of the work of John and Faith Hubley. The focus will be on their development as artists in animation with an ind-depth viewing of the artwork and films. Historian/animator, John Canemaker will host the talk and members of the family will be present.
Tickets are currently on sale: $3 for Academy members, $5 for general public. I would buy tickets quickly if you plan to go; it will likely sell out soon.
Visit Oscars.org to purchase tickets or go to the boxoffice of the Samuel Goldwyn Theater 8949 Wilshire Blvd. Beverly Hills, Ca 90028.
This show is a slightly different version of the program that John conducted in New York City at the Academy, here. It was covered in a large way by me on this Splog. Go here to see that post, which includes lots of pictures as well as the full contents of the event. The difference between this coming event and the NY one is that Faith Hubley was not part of the NY program. She and several of her films are included in the LA version.
- Last week, Bill Peckmann forwarded a number of pieces of art by Rowland B. WIlson which was preliminary work for a commercial at Phil Kimmelman and Associates. The commercial, for Vote Toothpaste, was a parody of Sherlock Holmes called Combs and Plotzen. More art surfaced this week for that spot, and I thought it worthwhile to extend the post for a second part. (See Part 1 here.)
Bill Peckmann writes:
Combs & Plotzen was the second TV commercial that print cartoonist Rowland B. Wilson designed in 1969 and his grasp of the animation production steps was truly amazing. No crash course in storyboarding, model charts, Layouts etc. was necessary. It was like he was doing it all of his life. We were in total awe.
At that time, Rowland was always very comfortable doing his animation drawings on the paper he knew best, tracing paper. He would work up roughs on layering tracing paper panels without having the need of a light box. No pegs for him in those days.
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These first five drawings are Layouts by Rowland Wilson.
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These are Jack Schnerk‘s roughs of the bicycle scene.
These are Bill Peckmann’s clean ups of Jack’s roughs.
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A model sheet from Rowland Wilson.
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These three color sketches are in the new book, Trade Secrets, by Rowland Wilson and Suzanne Lemieux Wilson.
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Row’s rough for pan scene.
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A ‘Combs’ cel.
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an unpainted model cel.
I found the original drawing I did of the crew that worked on Combs & Plotzen
way back then. It’s Vic Barbetta commenting on my lunchtime eating habits,
Jack and Phil’s anticipating the most important part of the day, the coffee wagon
bell, and Agnes hearing the good news of not having to draw anymore tiger stripes.
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At the time that Rowland designed his Utica Club Beer ‘Mountie’ spot, he also did another U. C. Beer spot where the two adversaries were a Knight and a dragon.
Unfortunately the only remaining piece that
I have from it is this stat of the Knight.
As for the dragon, all I can do is show you this page from
Suzanne Wilson’s ‘Trade Secrets’, where Rowland didn’t
forget his old friend from that commercial and gave him a
new coat of paint. One of his best character designs ever.
The tavern panel is a bg. from the same spot.
The Vote spot starts at 0:37 on this Jack Schnerk sample reel.
- Here are the Layout drawings by John Hubley for the Electric Company piece, Cool Pool Fool. Tissa David animated from these layouts and the verbal instructions from John.
A couple of drawings are missing #7 and #18
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Here are some frame grabs from the spot. They’ve been severely touched up in photoshop since the video has lost all color and is almost unwatchable except as a silhouette film. I’ve reconstructed the colors as near as I can remember them. At any rate, the purpose of these grabs is for you to see what Tissa has done with John’s layouts.
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Thanks to RIchard O’Connor, here is the
poor YouTube version.
The indomitable Billy Taylor wrote and performed the music.
What a great piano! I had the treat of spending a couple of
hours talking with him about his music for the Hubley films.
We talked for about a half hour about this music.
- Sifting through the boxed archives of Vince Cafarelli‘s saved material, there are quite a few pieces of art from a number of commercials. One that stands out includes the LayOut drawings of Fred Mogubgub for an O’Henry Bar animated commercial. The spot comes from the early days of Buzzco, 1982 or 1983 when Buzz Potamkin was still the principal in the company.
Fred Mogubgub was enough of an eccentric that I would be attracted to his artwork. (In case you’re unfamiliar with Mogubgub‘s work, here’s a four part series including his bio and some films.) I remember – as an art student in NY and desperately wanting to get into animation – the sign on 46th St and Sixth Ave: “Why Doesn’t Someone Give Mogubgub Ltd. Two Million Bucks to Make A Movie?” I asked Fred if he’d had any response. He said that ABC contacted him, and he gave them a script that was about a thousand pages big. It was about the contents of an ashtray. The characters were cigarette stubs, ashes and matches. To illustrate the script, he’d attached some used butts and matches within. They didn’t give him the money; you might have guessed.
On Blechman’s The Soldier’s Tale, there was a PT section of the animatic that Fred had done. We had to prepare this for a big screening for PBS trying to sell it for Bob. To get it into color, Fred and I would literally color the film, itself. He started at the head of the scene and I started at the end. We met in the middle. That piece of film had a life that was just too great. It couldn’t retain what we had done when it went to completion. Very exciting work and a fun afternoon coloring some footage with Fred.
Here are the Lay Outs Vinnie had saved for the past 30 or so years:
Our Lead Character – a model
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There seems to be no rhyme or reason
as to when things are top or bottom pegged.
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