Management


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Hi Folks, I’ve been a prodigal blogger again. It’s starting to dawn on me that writing a blog is kinda fun, but MANAGING a blog is like presiding over a remedial classroom, a classroom the size of the WORLD! In other words, the comments have been hacked. I have had to turn the access to the comments off from all un-registered people. However, I don’t know how to turn the registration process ON for those who wish to participate in a reasonable way. In the meantime, please communicate with me by my special email address: molasses@earthlink.net. I will manage comments from there. I will keep reminding readers to use this address in future posts, also, don’t forget to click on the small images you see on this page to see larger versions of them.

The MARVELOUS MIKEs this week are from 4-23-1956 to 4-28-1956, the Felix pages are from Felix #3, the next two pages of “You Auto Be In Pictures” by Jim Tyer. Cliff Crump is so astonished by Mike’s ability as a painter that he winds up in the police station!  Of course, allowing for today’s inflation, “Whistler’s Father” would now command a price of fifty grand.  Felix drives Mr. Mogul’s Alpha-Ravioli luxury car down to the power train in this week’s pages. You can easily feel what these pages would look like moving in Tyer’s animation style, lots of flying debris and staggered contacts as the Alpha-Ravioli falls apart, with those little black lines that break off and whirl around.

Cathy and I went to paint at Eaton Canyon in Pasadena last Thursday, March 6th. It was ideal weather down there, not much wind and plenty of light. Cathy did a great little 9″ by 12″ oil painting of a sycamore and an oak tree side by side. The sycamore was a warm white and the oak tree was in dark raw umber, topped by accents of orange leaves and a faint suggestion of violet mountains in the distance. Not so long ago, Cathy wouldn’t even TRY to paint an oak, they present too great a challenge in value and detail, but now she’s fearless. I titled her painting, “The Finish Line”, as the trees resemble a horse race, with a white and a black horse in a photo finish. I think she liked the idea. I still haven’t learned how to edit a complex environment like Eaton Canyon in watercolor and I produced a real mess. When that didn’t work, I made two MORE messes! It was one of those days when you just want to chuck all the paints in the nearest waste can and swear off! I didn’t put the garbage into the critique at the end of the session, not worthwhile.

I think I have seen just about all the Tex Avery MGM cartoons complete now, I finally saw the uncut GARDEN GOPHER. This one has a scene which is always faded off prematurely. Spike puts a big can of dynamite over the Gopher’s den and lights it. In the meantime, the Gopher pours a slippery pool of grease under Spike’s feet. When Spike turns to run, he can’t get traction in the grease and is caught in the explosion when the dynamite can blows up. This is where the action always fades out, in the middle of the explosion clouds. In the original, the clouds clear and Spike is burnt black, (with big lips and spit curls, natch) and running on the grease, VERY SLOWWWWLY.  It’s a black stereotype gag, but it is also animation based, going from a fast run pre-explosion, to a slow run, after the blast. It works on two levels at the same time, the Stepin Fetchit reference, and the natural drag that being blown up has on the dog’s body.  I will admit that I laughed, but I love Tex’s humor. I used to write Tex fan letters when I was a kid, sent in envelopes illustrated with my crude drawings of Screwy Squirrel, to which he never replied.  When I met Tex years later at the Cascade Pictures studio on Seward St., I reminded Tex of those letters, and asked him why I never heard back from him. He told me, “If I got letters from anybody with Screwy Squirrel on ’em, I’d pitch ’em in the wastebasket!” I have a few more little stories about Tex, but I will save them for another post.

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