Mark Kausler’s CatBlog

Keep Pitchin’ and Huntington Beach

Howdy y’all! Here are two more cel set-ups for sale from “It’s ‘The Cat'” just in time for the holidays. They are both large 16 field cels with colorscan backgrounds, and each set-up is matted and includes the pencil drawings that went with them.  The Three Blind Mice wind up to throw a brick and the Cat falls through a cloud: only $100.00 apiece, if you buy more than one, they will be $75.00. Team up with your friends and save! By the way, if there are any special cels you want from the film, just let me know and we will make them available.

Cathy and I spent Friday and Saturday in Huntington Beach, didn’t see any of you blog readers there. Everyone that DID come had a great time. We spent much of Saturday making paintings of the Beachfront Cafe near the Art Center. At the opening on Saturday, Cathy and I struck up a conversation with a lady who wanted to start an art career after she retires from her current job. The exhibition opened with Cathy’s painting of the Cafe included. Well some time went by, and lo and behold it sold! The buyer turned out to be that nice lady we had the conversation with earlier in the evening. She liked us and Cathy’s painting. So, be friendly to folks you meet at a gallery opening, they may buy your art! On Friday night, the $25.00 a head opening went very well. Cathy did a painting of the old Brewster’s Ice House (since 1945) in Huntington Beach at the suggestion of a local we met the previous week when we were doing paintings of the pier. We did sketches and took some digital photos of Brewsters. Cathy put “Brewster’s Ice House” in the show with a painting she did of surfers called “View From The Pier”, and her study of the pier itself, called “Ruby’s on the Pier”. It was a great opening, our friend Michael Situ took first prize for a Harbor study he did which made Huntington Beach look like Amsterdam! Some time went by and a “red dot” meaning “sold” appeared on the “Brewster’s Ice House” painting that Cathy did. The buyer turned out to be (who else) the local(s) who suggested that Cathy paint the ice house. By the amount of folks giving the ice house painting the once-over, more than one Brewster’s painting could have sold!  So when participating in a “Plein Air Festival”, pay attention to the tips on subject matter that the locals give you, they may wind up being your customers!

The KKs from this week range from 12-5-1938 to 12-10. Garge is starting to repeat himself, this “spy” sequence appeared earlier. It is re-drawn here to good effect, I like the disguises in which KK, Ignatz and Offissa Pupp cloak themselves.  In 12-7, Krazy almost looks like he belongs to the “KK”-K! Also as in previous strips, the principal characters have many doubles. Lane Allen’s Diary this week has some good mood stuff and silhouette drawings, building up the suspense as Lane and Mack square off. Note the spooky tree in the last panel. More “It’s ‘The Cat'” cels on sale next week! Keep checking www.itsthecat.com for other cel set-ups.

The Big Pitch (Pt. One)

Well, as promised here are some “keystoned” digital photos of two cel set-ups from “It’s ‘The Cat'” for sale. They are $100.00 apiece, matted, original hand-painted and inked cels with colorscan backgrounds. I will post more images of cel set-ups next week, please keep checking itsthecat.com for more cel set-ups next week. Greg promises that he will post some on the site at that time. The color is much better than what I have been able to photograph. I have to hold the set-ups at an angle to the lens to avoid reflections. I would scan these, but the scanner isn’t big enough to accept these cels.

The KK strips this week are all pretty much gag-a-day. I love 12-1-1938; Ignatz being hung up to dry just struck me funny. 12-2 shows a rare comment on contemporary “swing” music from Garge, evidently he didn’t hold the music in high esteem. I am continuing to post “Lane Allen’s Diary”, even though it gets no comments. I just love the drawings! In a few episodes you will see the influence of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” on the strip.

Cathy and I are continuing to paint on location. We were in Huntington Beach last Thursday, participating in the local Plein Air Festival.  We painted the pier and the Ruby’s restaurant at the end of it. There are some good painters entered, such as Michael Situ, Alfred Tse, Val Carson and more. The big opening festival is Friday Sept. 28th at the Huntington Beach Art Center. That costs $25.00 per head, food and wine provided. There will also be a free public viewing of the paintings on Saturday, Sept. 29th. We will all be painting outdoors near Main Street that day.  Come on down and meet Cathy and the other painters! The Art Center is at 538 Main Street in Huntington Beach, Ca. 92648. Their web site is www.surfcity-hb.org/visitors/art_center. We also went to the beautiful Crystal Cove State Park, where the famous cartoonist Roger Armstrong once lived. There are some ramshackle beach cottages there that almost beg to be painted. They were all once privately owned, but the state threw all the owners out. Now the state has control of the land and cottages and has some of them available for rent at a reasonable cost. It isn’t easy to get them, however, they book up in advance! Cathy and I were there on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, along with many members of the Oil Painters of America, such as Val Carson. Cathy did a beautiful beach scene, and I did mostly close-ups of the ruined and restored cottages. I think I was the only watercolorist there that day! There is a store nearby that sells some oils by such notables as Jason Situ, Ken Auster, Jeff Horn and many others. All these people are good painters and it is an honor to be around them.

Santa Barbara and Komics

Cathy and I went to Santa Barbara on Sept. 14-17 for the opening of the Oil Painters of America West Coast Regional Small Works show at the Waterhouse Gallery on State Street. Cathy’s small oil painting: “Koi Talk” was accepted into the show. She was thrilled! It’s quite difficult to get into an OPA show, very competitive. If you want to see an image of “Koi Talk”, just click on the link to her website. (It’s listed as “Catherine Hill, fine art page”.) We stayed at an inexpensive motel in town and did paintings of the Santa Barbara Mission on Sunday. When you’re out painting, you lose all track of time, I don’t even know what day it is anymore. I always love painting with my wife; I recommend that you go out and paint with someone you love.

I’ve posted six more KK’s, 11-21 to 11-26-1938. 11-23 and 11-24 feature one of Garge’s beloved scotty dogs that shared his home on Miravilla St. in the Hollywood Hills behind what is now the Hollywood Bowl. In an ideal world this home should be a Herriman Museum and shrine, instead it is still in use as a private home. At least they didn’t tear it down! I remember when one of Garge’s fanciful wooden windmills still decorated the roof, it’s gone now. I’ve also posted the next chapter of Lane Allen’s Diary, and my first attempt at drawing “the cat” on the computer. I used the “Corel Draw” program, it really makes you feel “wall-eyed” to draw with the mouse. Imagine, it took a “mouse” to draw a cat! Although I’m not too fond of the drawing, I kind of like the purity of the color, especially the magenta nose.

I did some DVD commentary for two Oscar honored Tom and Jerry cartoons today over at New Wave Entertainment. They are for a new DVD coming out featuring about 40 Oscar nominated and winning animated shorts. Amid Amidi and Jerry Beck also did some commentaries, and some on-camera interviews. These of course, are the shorts that Warner Bros. has access to, no Columbia or Universal material that I know of.  It’s a good sales hook to put a collection of Academy honored shorts together, but if you have studied the short subject, often the best and most original short films were left out in the cold at Oscar time.

Don’t forget to buy a cel from “It’s ‘The Cat'” for your holiday gift-giving. These may be the LAST production cels offered in this all-digital age in which we find ourselves. I will post some photos in the coming weeks of a few set-ups available for purchase. See you then!

Komics, and a Pitch

Here are the Kats from 11-14-1938 to 11-19. This whole week’s storyline is about Ignatz using the “think system” to feel rich. Sort of like Prof. Harold Hill as a money manager. My favorite from this week is 11-19, not so much for the gag with the Income Tax man, but the little sign on the wall, “El Ajo Cosquilloso”. In English it means, “The Ticklish Garlic”, a charming bit of Herriman’s whimsy. Maybe he picked it up from a Mexican on Olvera St. in Los Angeles or one of the vaqueros at the Wetherill Ranch in New Mexico.  The “Lane Allen’s Diary” page this week is from Jan. 6, 1957, the first clear date I’ve seen on these. I love the snow angels gag; I would have had a super size crush on Miss Castle if I were Lane Allen, or Ray.

The watercolor for this week was painted over at the San Gabriel Mission, founded Sept. 8, 1771, the fourth of the California Missions to be built. Our group showed up early the morning this was painted; most of the artists did the bell tower outside, but I was more intrigued with the Mission Gardens and courtyard, so I painted this sunny doorway. I don’t think the door is as old as 1771.  Cathy couldn’t be there that day, so it was one of my rare times representing both of us with the group.

All the artwork from “There Must Be Some Other Cat” has now been sent to Greg Ford in New York for ink and paint and final photography. Maybe soon we will be able to display some color sketches from the film on this blog. It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly ten years since I started this little picture. If any of you kind readers would like to help us with the production, please buy a cel from our first cartoon: “It’s ‘The Cat'”. The cels for sale should be on the website: itsthecat.com, but you can also purchase them direct from myself or Greg Ford: mkausler@earthlink.net, Fordcoink@hotmail.com. By all means write to Greg and bug him for cels, let’s all goad him into fury!

Your Komic Section

Here’s the Kat from 11-7-1938 to 11-12-38. The plot thickens with the mysterious mash note from Mimi the French Poodle. She has almost as impenetrable an accent as Krazy! Herriman’s French characters are very strange, I wonder if he liked or loathed the French? Also here is the next episode of Lane Allen’s Diary, still looking for some info on this strip. Can’t make a long post today, Cathy and I have a lot of plans for this week involving painting! I’ll report on this in the next post.

Sc. 26 completed! Some DVD mini-reviews.

 My next short cartoon; “There Must Be Some Other Cat” has completed principal animation. Sc. 26, the last scene was finished this week. The cat gets his comeuppance, is kicked out of his girlfriend Pearly’s house and lands in the arms of a prickly pear cactus. I had to animate the cat’s scramble after his landing in the cactus’s “arms” a couple of times to get the reaction just right and to get the musical ideas to work. Now the scenes will go to New York to be inked and painted by Greg Ford Co., Inc. With any luck, we might be in some festivals next year.

        I’ve posted another episode of the mysterious “Lane Allen’s Diary” from a religious weekly of the late 1950s. I love the drawing and the “Our Gang” feeling of this little-known strip. There are also a batch of six new Krazy strips from 10-31-1938 to 11-5. A new continuity story starts with Ignatz receiving a mysterious bon mot, only to have it intercepted by Don Kiyoti. Maybe it will continue next week, we’ll see. The watercolor this week is of the Catalina Island Casino, with the bay and a big passenger ship in the distance. What fun we had spending a few days painting on the island!

       I posted the old record cover with Walter Brennan as Grandpa McCoy, to illustrate a DVD mini-review. The Infinity Co. has put out the “Complete” first season of “The Real McCoys”, one of my favorite TV series from 1957-58. Grandpa McCoy is a character who never leaves me, so strong he is like an imaginary companion. I love his crankiness, and also his compassion and kindness. A poignant part of almost every show was Grandpa’s little interludes of prayer, usually just between him and his maker, except when he says grace at dinner. This series shows a San Fernando Valley gone forever, a rural farming country, before the freeways, when transplanted farmers from West Virginia made a living from the California soil. Some of the episodes were filmed in now long-gone L.A. landmarks, such as the Ambassador Hotel, formerly on Wilshire. Grandpa, Kate and his grandson, Luke, frequently dispense corporal punishment to the kids of the family: Hassie and Little Luke. Spankings were common in the late 1950s, most kids survived the experience.

Infinity did release “The Real McCoys” on DVD, but alas, it is NOT complete. These are the syndicated cut episodes, not the original ABC network versions. They run only 21 minutes and change apiece, except the pilot, which comes in at about 25 minutes. These shows when originally aired only had about two minutes of commercials, so originally ran about 28 minutes with titles. So that means almost 7 minutes of every show is gone. In many of the episodes there are very awkward scene cuts, artificial fade-outs and clipped speeches. Grandpa, as I said previously, took a moment in almost every episode for prayer, almost all those moments have been thrown out. It makes you wonder, just what is the extent of preservation on “The Real McCoys”? I have a network print of “Grandpa’s Date”, and it has his prayers and asides to the audience. Sometimes Walter Brennan did as many soliloquies in an episode as George Burns did in “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show”. Without these scenes, Grandpa loses a lot of his humanity and appeal, and only the broad outlines of his character are left. I don’t know if it would do any good to write to the Infinity Co. or SFM Entertainment, but if this set is trying to appeal to collectors or fans of the original series, they missed the mark like a nearsighted hen!

If you want to see a really good collector’s DVD, get the new Fox release of the Jack Benny 1941 version of “Charlie’s Aunt”. It’s a beautiful DVD of the only one of Jack’s movies I had never seen before, and it’s well worth seeking out. It was one of Jack’s personal favorite performances. It’s played pretty broad, and has a lot more slapstick and a faster pace than the Charlie Ruggles 1930s version. Randy Skredtvedt, the musicologist and Hal Roach expert, does an astounding and extremely informative commentary. He barely takes a breath for 82 minutes as he rattles off dozens of entertaining facts about Jack Benny, Richard Haydn, Edmund Gwenn, Kay Francis and even the set decorator! What may have kept this film off TV and home video for so long is that the original play is still under copyright, and the copyright owners only leased the rights to the play for five years at a time, then recalled the rights. It makes me wonder why the Ruggles version has been so ubiquitous all this time, if the rights story is true. Anyway, get this film and enjoy Jack Benny in drag having a wonderful time, especially when Anne Baxter and Arleen Whelan are giving him passionate kisses!

Painting, Three Little Ignatzes and The Snow Man

Here are the KKs from 10-24 to10-29-1938. I love the tripling of the cast with beards and striped outfits. The conical hats and sunglasses make Offissa Pupp look like Rabbis! It’s amusing that Pupp, Kat and Mouse can’t tell each other apart from their doubles, or is that triples? Anyway, it’s a graphically arresting sequence.

Cathy and I did not go painting last week, too darn hot, as Ann Miller once sang. I posted a watercolor I did of a little house in Monrovia that was painted on a hot and sunny afternoon a few months ago. Cathy likes the placement of the telephone pole in the composition. There were some beautiful old houses in that neighborhood, including one that had been transplanted from another part of town.

In film collecting, I came across a print of the 1940 black and white version of Paul Terry’s “The Snow Man”, remade in color in 1946. I have been searching for a copy of that cartoon for over 35 years! I was very curious about the re-make, wondering whether they just re-did the cels and backgrounds in color, or made changes. My friend Veto Stasiunaitis posted it for auction and I  took a chance on it, thinking it just might be the original version, instead of a black and white print of the color remake. I got the print from Veto, and put it on the projector without inspecting it first, that’s how excited I was to see it! The title card came on, and gave a 1946 date, so I was disappointed. But, as I watched the cartoon, the staging and animation of the three little rabbits building the snow man looked different, and when the snow man sings his song, he imitates Pinocchio by stretching his nose out! I also noticed that the bear with the Greek accent goes after the rabbits with a big saucepan, I didn’t remember that either. I got my print of the color version and ran it to compare. There are a few scenes that are the same, but the final sequence is entirely different. Instead of the bear chasing the little rabbits with a saucepan, he grabs his hunting cap and goes after the rabbits with a shot gun! The snow man takes a more active part than in the 1940 original by chasing down the bear and beating him up, Mighty Mouse style. In general, the 1946 remake shows the new more agressive tone in cartoon gags due to World War 2 and more pugnacious heroes such as Mighty Mouse. From the Nursery to the Boxing Ring in six short years. Terry remade several other black and white cartoons in color, such as The Watch Dog, Good Old Irish Tunes,  The Baby Seal, The Magic Shell and Funny Bunny Business. I have the black and white version of The Watch Dog, but I haven’t found the rest of them. Hope is rekindled by the discovery of  The Snow Man. The search continues.

Kats, Paintings and Fun

Here are eight, count ’em, eight KKs.  10-14-1938 and 10-15, then 10-17 thru 10-22. I am tired of splitting up the story lines on these dailies, so I’m going to try to post them a week at a time, just as they were originally published.  We have the end of Ignatz’s trickery from last week, and a new (komplete) story in which the feminine side of Krazy is featured. She finds a butterfly’s cocoon on her front step and has a few anxious moments taking care of it. Garge really gave a gentle side to his Kat in these strips, he is fully involved in the lives of every Coconino citizen and especially wants to shelter and protect the Kounty’s little ones. During 1936’s “Tiga Tea” storyline, Krazy falls in love with little “Kitten Ket” and wants to help him and his father, another instance of the mothering side of his character.

I have figured out some sort of scanning of a few of my watercolors I have talked about in past posts. Above is the swimming pool from the mansion on the Arroyo in Pasadena, and the old canning factory at the E. Waldo Ward ranch in Sierra Madre, Ca. I thought the swimming pool would be an especially appropriate subject for these “dog days” we are going through now. You may jump in, vicariously.

Last week, Cathy and I painted out in Descanso Gardens in La Canada. We arrived a bit late, Cathy painted some close-ups of Koi in a pond with a beautiful waterfall. I tried to paint an ambitious study of the whole pond with the waterfall in the background, but made it too monochomatic and the composition wasn’t focused right, so I’m not posting that one. Descanso Gardens was very therapeutic for Ken Anderson, by the way. If you look at the Disney Family Album episode he is featured in, he talks about how after his stroke, his wife took him to the Live Oak Grove in the Gardens. She placed him on a bench, folded up like a suitcase. As Ken recalled it, looking at the spreading branches of the oak trees made him want to spread his own arms and legs and get up and walk again. That’s a beautiful story and a great visual image to think about, even if it didn’t quite happen that way.

My natal anniversary was last week, Cathy and I celebrated it with our dear friends, Vincent and Hiroko Davis out in Shadow Hills at a little Chinese restaurant there. They served a Chinese birthday cake called the “Chinese Well”, which had a well of chololate cake, surrounded by ice cream and frosting. The whole meal was very good, I just had some of the leftovers tonight, and they were still tasty. It’s wonderful to be remembered by good friends like Vince and Hiroko, love you!

I am still enjoying the Woody Woodpecker DVD set, haven’t found one cut scene yet, except for the print of Banquet Busters not having the UA titles. I haven’t been able to see any DVNR in it either, and I have been looking at a lot of the shots one frame at a time. The 1940s Lantz animators were very innovative with their comic, stylized animation. If you look at it a frame at a time, you appreciate their achievements all the more. I laughed at La Verne Harding’s animation in “Fish Fry”.  Her best scene in that picture is the last one of the cat beating himself up for joy. The scene’s concept couldn’t have been easy to put over, but she made it look easy, supported by the great voice of the cat screaming “I made it, I MADE it, I MADE IT!!!” The cat’s Paul Terry-ish run to the horizon is funny and quite convincing; it’s a great example of the “successive breaking of joints” Art Babbitt principle. His feet contact the ground, his knees break on the next frame, then his hips “break” after that, following thru very loosely. The bulldog just sitting there through the whole performance is very wry and makes the cat’s demented ravings seem even more demented. Have fun watching these folks, they are worth looking at!

Thoughts and Kats

Here are the Kats from 9-30-1938 to 10-6. We have the conclusion of the log sequence from last week and a funny new series with Ignatz trying to do a phone-in order to Kolin Kelly. Offissa Pupp is so on the job it’s ridiculous! I love that pantomime strip of 10-1, Pupp is a smart/stupid wonder.

Cathy and I had a pretty good week. The only low point was trying to get a passport at the post office. When you have to wait an hour and a half to get waited on, with all the paper work filled out and the pictures taken, and  then give up in disgust without accomplishing anything, well…obviously the post office is not equipped for passport processing. We went to a beautiful house on Thursday morning which overlooks the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, beautiful views of the old Vista De Arroyo hotel and the old riverbed and the San Gabriel mountains! It was such a hot day that we found ourselves gravitating to the beautiful swimming pool and pool house in the front of the property. We vicariously experienced the cool water by painting the Ultramarine and Cerulean blues in the water with the peach/orange of the pool-house for contrast. The famous Jason Situ, world-class Chinese landscape painter joined us, and turned out a good oil study of the pool. His knowledge of values and colors is always inspiring to us, he always uses Prussian Blue for his darks, he likes to avoid black. As usual, Jason was the last artist painting, he’s slow, but good! He learned to paint the hard way, by being forced to paint images of Chairman Mao as a kid! It paid off.

I didn’t get any response to my mechanics problem on Sc. 25, so I am into the first third of Sc. 26, animating Pearly’s house going through gyrations. My animation board shorted out, and I’ve had a temporary light in it for awhile, but I longed to get it back in proper operation again. So, I called an electrician! Don’t do this, folks. He charged $100.00 just to LOOK at the job, then wanted $900.00 to rewire my desk and fix a ceiling fixture in the kitchen that also fizzled out. I didn’t even pay $100.00 for my animation desk in the first place! Well, needless to say, I didn’t hire him and found a handyman through our local hardware dealer. The guy came out to the house two days later, with all the proper tools in hand and fixed everything up for $75.00! The problem with the desk was a burned-out plug, not the wiring. Also the florescent tube was at the end of it’s life. Now with a new plug and tube, the old Disney Inbetweeners desk is working like new again. So if you hire an electrician with a fancy truck who charges a century note just to look at your job, think again, there’s cheaper ways to go.

In the previous post, Craig Clark asked me what I thought of the animated versions of Krazy Kat. If you want to limit it just to Herriman’s version of the character, then the 1936 Columbia cartoon; “L’il Anjil” is the most successful interpretation. The animation is fluid, the only significant voice is Offissa Pupp. Manny Gould and the other animators really make you feel the joy that Krazy feels from being socked with a brick, through that little dance than he does. The backgrounds and the props have a real Herriman feel to them, I even like the title card, a brick with the lettering inside of it. It is not perfect, it fails at capturing the underlying gentleness and bittersweet underpinnings of the love triangle that is central to the strip. In fairness, that kind of feel is probably outside the dimensions of a six minute slapstick animated cartoon, especially in 1936. The little mewling theme song that Joe De Nat wrote for this cartoon seems to be the perfect music for Herriman’s Kat. The second most successful animated version of Herriman (a very distant second) is Gene Deitch’s series of cartoons for Hearst corp. in 1963. Penny Philips was cast as the voice of Krazy, and she almost matches the way I hear Krazy as I read the strip, except Krazy sounds more like a lower east side Jewish mother. Where Gene made his mistake was giving Krazy feminine MANNERISMS to go with the voice. Krazy should move like a boy, but sound more or less like a woman with a strange accent. Paul Frees did a creditable job as Ignatz and Offissa, sounding tough as Ignatz and Ed Wynnish as Offissa. The animation is good off and on as schedules and the talents of the crew in Prague permitted. The style is close to Herriman, but a little too rough and coarse in the outlines. Herriman’s use of values and his aggressive cross-hatching sometimes make it look like his characters are emerging from blackness. Gene’s art direction looks too sunny and open-air. He did set all the action in Coconino with the monuments from the Navajo Tribal Park in all their glory, so at least that was done right.

Most of the other attempts at Krazy cartoons missed Herriman completely. Some, however, succeed at being good animated cartoons anyway. I like the looseness of Bill Nolan and Grim Natwick’s animation in the early 1920s releases such as Bokays and Brickbats, which has Krazy fighting a whole army of Ignatz like-alooks. “Making Good” has some great Grim Natwick tall girls in it, and some nice animation of Krazy looking for a hair ribbon. The silent Ben Harrison and Manny Gould efforts such as Sleepy Holler that were recently uprooted from the British Film Institute look good and show Krazy as a dad with a bunch of little Krazys in a cradle. The animation is good, but not as good as the Bill Nolans. I love the early thirties sound Columbia Krazys, not because they evoke Herriman, but because they are noble cartoons with the even nobler music of Joe De Nat to support them. Have you seen “Farm Relief” from 1929? This was apparently made in New York, as some of Friz Freleng’s animation is in evidence with very Harman-Ising style chickens laying eggs in a great hatching-to-maturity cycle. Harrison and Manny Gould tried a lot of story concepts which no other studio attempted, like trying to explain Wall Street in LAMBS WILL GAMBLE (1930), I love the bear sequence in that one, Joe De Nat underscores it with the old “Grizzly Bear Rag” song. BIRTH OF JAZZ (1932) is one of my favorites as Harrison/Gould’s version of Krazy is dropped down a chimney by the stork and emerges as a Ted Lewis bringing “St. Louis Blues” to life on his licorice stick. He then hops a plane with all the instruments and brings jazz to the whole world. 1935’s THE HOTCHA MELODY is one of the few cartoons that shows the life of a creative person, in this case a composer of popular music (Krazy Kat), in the actual process of getting an idea. He is literally tempted by the devil to steal Robert Schumann’s “Traumerai” and turn it into a popular song called “The Hot-cha Melody”. Krazy is delighted to hear his song on all the radio stations sung by Kate Smith, Bing Crosby, the Boswell sisters and Cab Calloway. He pays the price though, when the spirit of Schumann appears to him and beats him up for stealing his melody. There is satiric commentary about Tin Pan Alley and the whole process of popular music marketing in the thirties that I’ve never seen in any other cartoon. I’ve always liked 1936’s THE MERRY CAFE too. It’s about poor Krazy starving amid plenty in the “Eat-O-Mat”, a cartoon version of Manhattan’s Automat restaurant of the 1920s and 1930s. The whole concept of “automatic” dining works well as cartoon backdrop and the fantasy sequence with the various foodstuffs coming to life is a lot of fun. My favorite scene is the hot drops of chocolate emerging from an urn and turning into little black dancers. I think Joe De Nat uses the “Muskrat Ramble” to great effect in this cartoon. A few peaches sing “Music Is Magic” by Arthur Johnston, from the 20th Century-Fox musical “Music Is Magic” introduced by Alice Faye.

I’ve always imagined Columbia’s Krazy to be a Kat apart. He was the first character I was exposed to as a kid with the name Krazy Kat, so I thought he was the “real” Kat. Then when our local TV station ran “L’il Ainjil”, I thought something was terribly wrong! What happened to Krazy? Who were that weird dog, duck and mouse? Well, thanks to Coulton Waugh’s “The Comics”, I found the answer, the comic strip! It was love at first sight, ever since then I’ve read Krazy Kat where ever I can find it. The strip is really a pure thing, it can’t successfully be interpreted in any other media. Of course, I’ve never seen the John Alden Carpenter ballet, but for that I’d need a time machine! So long until next time.

HIYA

Here’s Krazy, 9-23-1938 through 9-29.  This week, the bank sequence from last week winds up with a rubber check gag, and Garge starts a “transportation” cycle this week. I love the pose of Krazy skating in 9-26, and the wagon with a sail in 9-28 reminds me of the Disney limited animation cartoon: “Windwagon Smith”.

I almost finished Sc. 25 this week of “There Must Be Some Other Cat”. I have a mechanics problem. I know how to pan north and south on a conventional 90 degree tilt set-up. How do you pan north and south on a conventional 12 field center set-up? Do you use floating pegs? Pearly, the cat’s “girl-friend” picks the cat up by the scruff of his neck and then lifts him up north. Consequently, the BG should move about 3 inches south and hook up with a new BG that will pan to the right. Any of you geniuses out there have a suggestion about how to prepare backgrounds for moves like that? Sorry, computer devotees, this is for conventional camera mechanics experts only.

Cathy and I went out to the old E. Waldo Ward jelly factory in Sierra Madre last Thursday and painted with our Thurs. morning group. E. Waldo Ward Co. make a great orange marmalade and import and stuff olives from Spain. Cathy did a study of their orange grove (one of the last standing groves in Sierra Madre, Ca.) in oil and I did a watercolor of the old jelly factory itself, which is a corrugated tin building. Cathy’s painting has beautiful colors in it, orange, green and violet shadows, it looks very inviting. It was a hot day but a great day for cast shadows and creating an image from the color temperature of those shadows. If I ever get a #$%^&* scanner going, I’ll display some images of our paintings to make these posts more stimulating. Speaking of computer geniuses, my brother-in-law’s in town now on vacation from his teaching job in Edwardsville, Illinois. Maybe he can give me some ideas on preparing scans for blogging. Hope ya’ll have a great week ahead!

Of Kats and Painting

Here are the KKs from 9-16 to 9-22-1938. Mostly bank and money jokes this week, maybe Garge had some banking altercations that inspired the gags. Look at all the different ways that Krazy’s head and body are constructed within the same strip, 9-21, yet he remains Krazy. Cathy and I managed to get to Buster’s coffee house in South Pasadena for our Thursday paint-out on July 12th. We painted Buster’s from across the street, and  had fun doing it while the new “Gold Line” trolley cars ran by. We were critted by our mentor Walter McNall, who keeps advising me to always paint the shadows first in a composition, and put people or animals in the picture to keep it interesting. He’s a tough critmaster, but fair. Walter has been painting many years, and almost always sells his stuff, often to casual passers-by.

I have two ideas that could help save the world we live in, someone please invent a miniaturized solar battery! If they can miniaturize computers into the Iphone, why can’t somebody shrink the solar battery to a more manageable size with increased storage capacity? Then we can finally run our cars directly with sun power!  The other idea: read aloud to your kids, and do it often! If we are going to develop oral tradition and a love for storytelling, we should all read aloud our favorite stories to children, both our own and at your local public libraries. Pry ’em away from all the electronic squawk boxes, grab your copy of “The Curious Lobster” and read it aloud! Read it well, make it interesting and you’ve hooked a new generation on story telling and the wonders of books.

Use the link to the right to get to Tom Stathes’s blog and take advantage of his big 50% off DVD sale. This offer is good up to August first. Just tell him I sent you. Three of my favorite Stathes DVDs are # TS-21, Bonzo the Pup, a rare collection of Studdy’s famous British dog character. This DVD includes some titles transferred from 9.5mm prints including Aladdin Bonzo, a Stathes exclusive, and Dog-Gone, in which Bonzo drinks a bottle of Bass Ale at the finish. TS-17, Felix the Cat, Vol. 3, has a rare excerpt from the early 30s Felix: Hootchy Kootchy Parlais Vouz, which uses that wonderful toy-like design. Felix’s body is the shape of a bowling pin in this one, there is a great scene of Felix marching along, leading a big parade of cats. This fragment is all that survives from this rare Felix cartoon. T.S. 04: Rare Silent Cartoons Volume 1 has such rarities as Kat in Chinatown, a live action/animation combo cartoon featuring Tad Dorgan’s Cat. Speaking of Tad Dorgan, there is also on the same DVD, the animated version of Tad’s “Indoor Sports” comic strip, featuring the Joys and Glooms animated by Bill Nolan! This is a very inexpensive way to get viewing copies of under-circulated silent animation, and help Tom out on his crusade to rescue and help preserve early cartoons. C’mon now, git yer onery hides over there and cough up! You’ll be glad you did.

Here’s to ya!

It’s not often that Garge references animated cartoons in his strip, but take a look at 9-9-1938 and 9-10.  In the finish to last week’s sequence, Ignatz tries to convince Offissa Pupp that the brick is actually an animated drawing! Pupp comes up with an animated rejoinder in 9-10 with his rolling jail. I love the gag in 9-14, it feels like Garge might have used in earlier years; it sort of ties in with the animation theme this week. Take a look at the drawing of Ignatz socking Krazy in the 9-15 strip. I think it’s the happiest Krazy that Garge ever penned. Once again, Ignatz tries to fool Offissa Pupp into thinking that the brick is a hallucination, but this time it doesn’t work. By the way, did you know that if you click on the strips, they will display larger in a seperate window? Some people don’t know that.

Cathy and I saw “Ratatouille” at the Sam Goldwyn theater last week. No film involved, an all digital presentation of an all-digital film. The image was very clean, no scratches or cue marks, looked almost flawless, although a shade under-lit. We all were really watching extremely high-class projected television. I must admit that I wasn’t thinking about whether it was film or digital projection until about half-way through the film. There was no hard-edge film “strobe” or chattering in the image, and that’s when it dawned on me that I wasn’t watching film.

“Ratatouille” is a pretty good looking (digital) “film”, we were both entertained by it. We are both fans of cooking and the Food Network, so the subject matter was appealing. Brad could have spent even more time in the kitchen cooking and less time with the romantic subplot, which didn’t seem believable. Preparing the actual ratatouille dish for the food critic, and his reaction to it, was the highspot of the picture for me. I’m glad Brad didn’t succumb to temptation and made one of the chefs a caricature of Emeril Lagasse, or something, though Emeril (Food Network chef) is quite a cartoony guy.

I used to animate for Brad, I worked on “The Family Dog” episode of Amazing Stories that he directed. I worked free-lance, one of the scenes I did was the Family Dog dropping his dog dish on the floor at the feet of the housewife. Brad was a good director and very intensely involved in telling the story. Sometimes he was so dedicated to, and emotional about the picture that I feared for his health. All of us who worked on the episode received T-shirts from Brad that said “Birdworks Animation Guerillas” on one side, and “Die, Mediocrity, Die!” on the reverse. Brad, was then and still is determined to purge his films of all “mediocrity”. You can never say that Brad doesn’t care about his work. Now that digital puppeteering has replaced the animated drawing as his performance medium, he can no doubt do corrections and changes and additions to scenes more easily than ever before. For the most part, this works in favor of the acting and against “mediocrity”. The only thing that bothered me even a little bit, was the sameness (not mediocrity)  in the expression of anger by most of the characters, be they rats, big chefs or little chefs. When one character gets angry at another one, they usually get nose to nose, teeth clenched in anger, usually with big gestures and Milt Kahl headshakes. The lady chef certainly acted that way in her early scenes with Linguini, and the head chef (the little guy) expressed anger in a similar way. Even the restaurant critic, voiced by Peter O’Toole let his anger boil over at least once that I recall. All of this isn’t really that much of a flaw, as it is a reflection of Brad’s personality through his characters. Brad can be a very intense (even angry) guy at times. Anger is a very “felt” emotion, and is fun to animate. Happiness, love, tenderness can be fun to express as well, but don’t involve the whole body as intensely as anger can. Maybe these scenes needed just a little more thought about how that SPECIFIC character would feel and express anger.

I thought the art direction and lighting in the movie were outstanding. I think Michel Gagne (it certainly looked like his stuff) animated the Oskar Fischinger-esque spirals and grawlixes to show visually how food tastes to a gourmand. They accompanied Remy talking about mixing flavors. When Remy’s pal, the fat rat, becomes aware of flavors, the grawlixes are there, but less intense in value and color to illustrate his amateur standing as a food fancier. The mobile camera is a very flexible tool in the hands of digital puppeteers, with the dimensional character, the camera can move all around, in front, behind and inside the character quite fluidly. Sometimes, this works well, as in the scene where Remy is throwing ingredients into a pot and the camera slowly circles him as he does it. Animating a scene like that with drawings would be a very difficult acting and technical challenge. I felt a bit less comfortable with several sequences in a row of Remy scrambling up and down buildings closely followed by the digital camera. One sequence like that would have been impressive, two or three in a row become disorienting on the big screen, and after awhile the audience takes them for granted. Does camera movement like that really advance the story? Sometimes simple camera pans over well-designed sets work just as well. Of course with such a Pandora’s box of tricks and tools as digital puppeteering provides for the filmmaker, the question is often: “I know I CAN, but SHOULD I?” “Ratatouille” is really enjoyable, though, although some folks, like Mike Sporn, were repulsed by a lot of rats in the kitchen. Well, at least they sterilized themselves in the dishwasher before working with the food, Mike. (I liked how fluffed up they were when coming out of the steamer.) I found myself more bothered by a cartoon cliche like a single-shot rifle (fired by the old lady), being able to fire many times in succession without being reloaded! I’m going to shut up, now. Expressing any kind of opinion on the internet can be troublesome and doing reviews of friends’ work can be dangerous. Fortunately, relatively few people read this blog. ‘Bye til next time.

Howdy, folk!

All is illusory with Garge this week. In 9-2 and 9-3, he finishes off the eyeglasses idea he started with Offissa Pupp using phony specs to make himself look wide awake. This reminds me of the Tom and Jerry cartoon “Sleepy Time Tom”. Remember Tom painting pupils on his eyelids to fool Mammy into thinking he was alert? I’ll bet this gag has it’s roots in vaudeville. In 9-5 through 9-8-1938, Garge is anticipating Crockett Johnson (“Harold and the Purple Crayon”). What is the difference between a real brick and a brick drawn with a pencil in a pen and ink world? I love the gag in 9-8: Ignatz draws lines to indicate rain and then Krazy (offstage) draws an umbrella to shield himself from the ink-line raindrops. The fact that Krazy draws the umbrella for himself off-stage heightens the mystery, Garge is asking his readers to participate in the gag.

I shot the first take of Sc. 24 last Sunday, and it’s going to take at least two more passes to get it right. I have a few too many poses and ideas that don’t support the main idea of the shot. So  I have to take them out, re-time and revise. I still haven’t done the effects of Pearly (the cat’s object d’amour) crying. Cathy and I did get out to Monrovia, Ca. this week to paint a charming old neighborhood. Cathy drew with pencil this time, and I did two watercolors of Tudor style homes, with the San Gabriel mountains behind them. One of the paintings almost worked! I would love to get scans up of some of my paintings, maybe one day I can afford a good art quality scanner. Any experienced bloggers out there have any recommendations? Have a great Independence day week!

Yeah, Baby

Here are the KKs from 8-26 to 9-1-1938. The finish of the wall sequence from last post and a new character: “Mr. Beaver”.  Mr. Beaver’s tail makes a good comic prop in 8-31 and 9-1, serving as both defense of Krazy’s bean and offense on Offisa Pupp’s noggin. There’s the “cobble rock” again in 9-1, note the beautiful shading in the last panel. I like Krazy’s “stend-in” in 8-30, is he a dog or a cat? I have been working on Sc. 24 most of this week, am almost ready for the first test of the scene. I will have another pass to add the effects once the characters are moving well. When I spend a long time animating a scene, this time months, I sometimes don’t want to see a test. I’m afraid that the scene in “real time” won’t live up to my expectations. If it doesn’t, there’s a lot more work to do until it does. At least full animation is relatively easy to shoot, it’s limited stuff that’s hard, with it’s muti-levels of seperate mouths, heads, arms, cycles, etc. It used to be quite a job of book-keeping doing limited TV stuff.  Flash animation looks about as complicated, level-wise, except now they call it “layers”.  Once again, no painting this week, maybe next if the Lord allows. Don’t miss Allen Holtz’s “Strippers Blog” for the 1906 Herriman political cartoons. In those days, all the guys dressed in black and looked like the villain in “The Drunkard”, at least that’s the way Garge drew ’em. The link to Allen’s page is on this blog.