Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- On Thursday, this week, I went to the Museum of Modern Art to see the reconstructed prints of the Laugh-O-Grams they were screening. These were among the first series Disney produced in Kansas City. Apparently, four of the seven titles were missing, and found within the MOMA library mislabelled.

The Laugh-O-Grams were originally produced for a man named Frank Newman, a local theater owner. They were designed as quick sketch movies with an animated hand seemingly drawing illustrations which would end up as quick gags or ads for local merchants. The first film shown was one of these films, and it’s probably the one of those that I most enjoyed.

Eventually, Walt and his staff started making a story film for themselves, trying to improve the product. Little Red Riding Hood was finished within six months and they began work on the Four Musicians of Bremen.

MOMA screened both these films as well as the found others. They were all British prints attributed to Bollman and Grant, credited as producers for the New York-based Sound Film Distributing Corp; in England, Wardour Films distributed these films. They were headlined as “Peter the Puss” films, which Disney had called “Julius the Cat.”

All of the films had new titles:
Little Red Riding Hood was called Grandma Steps Out.
Goldilocks and the Three Bears was called The Peroxide Kid.
Puss In Boots was The K-O Kid
Cinderella was The Slipper-y Kid

The Peroxide Kid AKA Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

It was a treat seeing these all projected with a live piano accompaniment that started as stiffly as the animation in the films, but soon grew very lively and filled with a sense of fun.

The films made me think of all the Flash animation being done today with much more limited results than these unknowledgeable beginners were able to pull off back in 1922. These guys were making up an industry and having more fun doing it than most of what I see on a screen today. (Actually, it’s more YouTube and Vimeo than a real screen. Perhaps if it were harder to get the films screened more imagination would go into them.) I wish there had been more animators in attendance at the Museum show and hope that they went to the first screening last Sunday.

The screening ended with a never-ending supply of Ub Iwerk’s films in glorious Cine-color. There’s nothing that’ll make things more attractive than an Aqua and Orange pallette. I’ve seen all of these films a hundred times if I’ve seen them twice, so I was not ready to make my way through an hour’s worth of them. If I’d been alone, I would have left.

The attempt was made to keep the fairy tales by Disney playing with fairy tales by Iwerks. I would have preferred seeing some of the later Iwerks Willie Whopper films. Those have a really odd side to them, and their backgrounds are most peculiar as well as the live jazzy soundtracks employed.

Willie Whopper, The Good Scout hung out to dry.

Balloon Land aka The Pincushion Man is probably the oddest of Iwerks’ work.
It played to near absolute silence.

I met Mike Barrier for the show; he was in town for the weekend with his wife, Phyllis, celebrating a key wedding anniversary. David Gerstein and Tom Stathes also joined us. David, with some help from Tom, was instrumental in identifying these films. It was nice to finally meet the two of them; Mike and I have been old friends for a long time.

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