Metro's Accent On Youth

Performing children can (often do) annoy adults, no matter how capable and talented. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland came nearest to universal acceptance, captivating mass followers for a near decade playing kid/adolescents. She was 20 and he 22 when Girl Crazy concluded their co-star teamings. For monies these two generated, it might have gone on forever but for cruelties of time and aging. The latter came hardest for Rooney, but more of that anon. I've watched pieces of something called High School Musical to gauge then and now barometers of youth in the spotlight. Disney manufactures teen idols today like Krispy Kreme cooks donuts, and their public seems untroubled by resolute sameness among casts shifting, then falling through trap doors back to presumed obscurity from which most came. I’m no fair judge of such industry, but who’d not smell rats when singing/dancing "talent" seldom does so for more than three seconds of exposed film (or video tape)? Looking at Girl Crazy made me realize anew how badly we’re cheated by modern musicals constructing each recital out of film strips less than an arm’s length, with dances executed not on stage, but in the editor’s hovel. I timed Rooney and Garland at sixty-nine seconds of sustained hoofing with not one cut. When have we seen that lately? Technology allows us to fake most anything now, including musical/dancing ability. As to that wider audience net MGM cast in 1943, I don’t wonder at grownup acceptance of Girl Crazy (extended runs and one million in profits), as adults are woven into the narrative and do participate throughout. The divide and conquer your fragmented public was years away then. Its almost startling to observe Mickey and Judy in such relaxed negotiation with old-timers initially bemused by, but ultimately accepting of, young ideas. As with other Metro celebrations of adolescent energy, teens are respectful (Rooney unfailingly addresses elders as ma’am or sir), while dress codes are observed by way of neatly tailored suits and junior miss outfits. Parental conflict is minimal with always the promise of reconciliation and never a suggestion of teen mischief beyond harmless (read likeably spirited) levels. Metro wisely chose not to challenge the viewer nor make anyone feel excluded or uncomfortable. To damn old Hollywood for such cunningly applied social science is really just shooting fish in a barrel for enlightened observers lamenting admitted hypocrisies of these films, but would MGM have profited so confining Rooney and Garland to the sort of kiddie ghetto High School Musical occupies? The more baloney I sense in these forties fairy tales, the more I admire the sheer audacity of putting forth such skewed reality and making it pay across demographic landscapes unknown to programmers today.

Girl Crazy opens on a close-up of beaming Mickey Rooney. Such was his popularity at the time that it was enough to kick start on that puckish face and engage the people's delight with grosses assured. I’ve sympathized with Rooney’s ongoing effort to convince youngish interviewers that he really was the Number One boxoffice attraction in the United States for several years running during the early forties. So many of those who loved and laughed with Andy Hardy are gone or going. Mickey will be 88 in a few months. Another year and he will have outlived Judy Garland by four decades. I wonder how many of their old pictures he actually sits down and watches now, and what specific memories he still has. There’s an extended routine in Girl Crazy where Mickey plays ring announcer for an imaginary boxing match. I’d assume those are dead-on impressions he’s doing of various sports commentators of the day, but who’d remember names, let alone voices, so obscure? Rooney was noted as well for wicked mimicry of Lionel Barrymore. I wonder when they last prevailed upon him to do that routine. Sands have shifted so as to make Girl Crazy seem like something that was made two centuries ago. It’s hard to imagine people still with us being involved in it (any left other than MR?). Mickey’s the sort of quadruple talent threat I can’t imagine seeing today. Being a child of vaudeville and silent comedies (!), you’ve got to assume he could do anything by 1943, so it’s no shock to see him blazing over the keys as piano accompanist to Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Rooney mentions that signal honor in a newly-filmed intro for the Girl Crazy DVD, but I’d like knowing if he’s aware, or has forgotten, that his playing was eventually dubbed by Dorsey veteran Arthur Schutt (although Mickey’s finger work is every bit as accomplished as Tyrone Power’s would be in The Eddy Duchin Story). Rooney still figures he was shafted by paymasters at Metro. Based on earnings from his films, I’d say he’s got more than a good point, but who told him Girl Crazy grossed more than forty-seven million worldwide? His autobiography also reports $68,166 in compensation for doing the feature (to Garland’s $28,666), and neither of us got a dime’s worth of royalties from all those great songs we recorded. It never takes Rooney long to get around to topics of money he didn't receive for work performed so many years ago. I can see him sidling up yet to Warner hands to inquire if a few dollars shouldn’t be had for introducing his and Judy’s old musicals on DVD. Good thing they haven’t appointed me paymaster there, for I’d probably slip him keys to the strongbox just out of sentiment.

No sooner would MGM develop one singing/dancing prodigy than they’d go in quest of his/her successor. Judy Garland’s potential replacement shows up in Girl Crazy before she does. June Allyson was talent well and good unless you put her on a stage with Garland, which Metro wisely never did. Judy’s instability created urgency to locate other girls who could do what she did at something like her level of efficiency. That never happened, of course, and self-aware pretenders understood the hopelessness of their commission. June Allyson spoke later of executive efforts to pit her against Garland, though the former had but to compare her own spirited, but ultimately conventional trouping, against unique gifts of the latter to know there was just no competition. Nothing was so humbling for singing ingenues at Metro than being held to impossible Garland standards. Shirley Temple (here with Louis Mayer, Garland, and Rooney) came over from Fox at twelve and found her once applauded song and dance skills cruelly diminished by arrangers indignant over her seeming inability to do it like Judy. She’d be stripped of confidence and badly used in a single misjudged vehicle (Kathleen) before being let go. MGM continued in the grip of youth madness inspired by runaway Rooney/Garland profits. Here was an ongoing brand that sold --- imagine what multiple teams of kid performers could bring? There were efforts toward that remembered by few today. Born To Sing was Ray McDonald and Virginia Weidler in Mickey/Judy disguise --- an experiment not repeated. Youngsters just off Broadway hit Best Foot Forward have supporting bits in Girl Crazy, bits being the operative word as most of Nancy Walker and Gil Stratton wound up in editor wastebaskets. No one in authority wanted to admit the impossibility of duplicating Rooney and Garland. With growing realization of that, Mickey and Judy began swinging weight around on Girl Crazy and though other factors entered into it, a negative cost at 1.4 million did show marked increases over Babes On Broadway ($955,000), Strike Up The Band ($854,000) and Babes In Arms ($748,000).

Busby Berkeley directed the number for which Girl Crazy is best remembered and then was fired off the picture. He’d gotten edgier and more belligerent (according to arranger Roger Edens, who became his archenemy of sorts). Berkeley was one of those enormous talents you had to make many an allowance for. He yelled at everybody and made them work until three in the morning(s). I Got Rhythm was seven minutes plus he contributed that made the rest of Girl Crazy look punk by comparison. No wonder they decided to close the picture with it. Warners found multiple recorded tracks and wedded them to give stereo effect to Berkeley’s spectacle. That multi-channel version is an extra on the DVD and it’s stupefying. Internal frictions led to Busby’s ouster, though fan presses would be stealthily informed it was Judy Garland’s power play that got him canned in favor of lower-keyed journeyman Norman Taurog (shown here on Palm Springs location with Rooney and Garland). Hedda Hopper visited the set and broke columnist protocol with a barbed account of directorial abuses she'd observed. Was this part of a neat frame MGM was putting Berkeley in? Hopper described a wild gleam in the director’s eye as he pushed Garland close to hysteria. The star added helpfully that she’d felt lashed by the figurative big black bullwhip Berkeley carried. The set photo here shows Judy holding her director’s hand and looking at the least attentive. Was Hopper’s column the pulpit chosen for captive Trilby to declare her liberation from tyrant Berkeley and thereby grease wheels for his exit? Effects this wound-tight genius achieved weren’t possible short of endless rehearsal and back breaking effort. At a point where feeling their oats Rooney and Garland were bent on slowing their workday tempo, Busby seemed intent upon increasing his. The ultimate victors in such a contest was a foregone conclusion, though posterity would be served by the latter’s resulting loan-out to Fox and The Gang’s All Here, perhaps the best known musical for which Berkeley received director’s credit. Aforementioned Taurog, for whom the label "journeyman" seems unduly dismissive in view of his previous directorial work, would complete Girl Crazy. He began by acting kid parts in 1912, and was writing and directing comedy for Larry Semon by the time he was twenty-one (the two of them were pallbearers, along with Babe Hardy, at Virginia Rappe’s funeral!). Later there were two-reelers he guided for Lloyd Hamilton, one of those neglected funnymen whose output mostly burned up in warehouses. Thanks to good offices of Looser Than Loose and their prodigious catalog of silent comedies on DVD, I saw two of Taurog’s laffers with Hamilton --- Careful Please and Nobody’s Business. Both were howls and showed this writer/director to be a top hand with sight gagging (a five-disc Lloyd Hamilton set is available from L.T.L. and comes highly recommended). Taurog’s legacy got a raw deal when writer Peter Biskind used him to lead off a scabrous account (in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) on doddering old-time directors kept working as young Turks were held at bay, the book’s sympathies clearly with those outsiders looking in. Some veterans were admittedly too long at the party. Taurog might better have retired sooner, but then we’d not have enjoyed that inimitable retro touch he brought to Sergeant Deadhead, Spinout, and Dr. Goldfoot and The Bikini Machine!

Fatty's Fate and Roscoe's Rescue

Would that Roscoe Arbuckle’s image were as pristine as this 1919 Pierce-Arrow that once belonged to him! The sleek roadster travels now among auto buffs faintly aware of the forlorn figure pondering his fate on its running board as San Francisco prosecutors sharpened their knives back in September 1921. Leave us face it … Arbuckle is now and will forever be known primarily as tawdry footnote to a period in film history mostly forgotten (challenging enough getting anyone to watch something from the twenties, but the teens?). His comic pioneering seems all the more remote for old rags and hanks of hair that pass for surviving prints. Watch those ghostly figures steeple-jumping over splices and sections missing, then try convincing your doubtful audience that such things once delighted millions. Examine ancient books and periodicals and you’ll find Fatty smiling on every other page. His was the cherubic face people loved (and remember that a heavyweight like him was less common then than now), an oasis of humanity among freakish ensembles populating early comedy. Roscoe's girth was the happier substitute for grotesque mustaches and eyes so heavily made up as to resemble black pools. Kids making their first calls on phones but recently installed would ask exhibitors what funnies they’d be playing, then follow beelines in the event it was Fatty. How many of them cried when he was brought to ruin? So many cheerful images (including this Yule art with Charlie Chaplin) would be banished as if to exorcise an industry of taint Arbuckle was said to have brought upon it. Search for remnants today and chances are you’ll come up empty, as poster survival rate for his films is but a tick above that of pterodactyls. Every stream of Roscoe’s life and accomplishment feeds into that reservoir of tragedy and downfall. He is film history’s reigning underdog, and fans consumed by the injustice won’t rest until Fatty’s out of Coventry and standing equal with comedy’s big three. Would you rank Roscoe with Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd? Having watched most of Laughsmith’s wonderful DVD collection, The Forgotten Films Of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, I’m inclined toward at least sympathy placement for this saddest of clowns. Nothing’s so fascinating, so compelling, as greatness laid low, and seeing Arbuckle’s output finally celebrated brings him closer (for me) to standing within at least hailing distance of the triumvirate. Should gods of nitrate preservation smile more generously (and a number of his thought-lost films have surfaced over the last ten years), Arbuckle’s reputation may yet scale greater heights. The litanies of what if litter the path of every Arbuckle historian. You’d like to take those forks he missed, for most would have led to a better place for Roscoe. I watch him now and laugh, though images of cruel chance and pitiless fate linger. Should one look to season classic slapstick with real-life loss its practitioners knew, Arbuckle rises quickest to the top, with Keaton, Chaplin, then Lloyd following. Fish for comedy out of such troubled waters and you may find Arbuckle greatest of them all.

Keystone comedies generally start at a run and gain speed from there. People kick and get kicked. They chase and fall down. After awhile, you lose track of who’s being chased and why. Sometimes I’ll twilight during a Keystone and two reels will pass by without me. Mack Sennett emphasized the motion in pictures. Anything standing still made him nervous. Were viewers in 1914 so restless? I’ve read of audiences divided between immigrants and illiterates, packed into refitted storefront ovens generally smelling to high heaven because there was no ventilation. Did these pickled herring laugh at everything they saw? As early Keystones play like one never-ending pursuit extended over hundreds of single reels, you figure a saturation point had to be forthcoming. Roscoe Arbuckle was on the performing road enough years to know he’d need to vary his screen act to keep patrons coming. His weight makes Fatty recognizable in comedies that seldom used close-ups. He is expressive where other faces speed past in blurs. He’d try for moments of subtle pantomime in front of jittery cameras on seeming rubber legs. To appear human in the Keystone universe was accomplishment plenty. People falling off sheer cliffs and walking away from point blank gunshots forfeited audience identification. Arbuckle knew that wouldn’t do. He began directing (under Sennett imposed guidelines) and teamed with Mabel Normand in marital farces. She’d supervised comedies as well, and shared with Roscoe a conviction that the future belonged to characters as opposed to caricatures. Charlie Chaplin’s looming shadow obscured foundations these two laid and rough edges they smoothed. History would credit him for comedy’s emergence out of darkness, but how much of that came of Chaplin’s greater longevity and a better survival rate for his Keystone shorts? Normand’s death in 1930 and Arbuckle’s in 1933 closed the book on a debate that may yet be revived should we come across the dozens of still missing Fatty and Mabel comedies. By 1916, Arbuckle was making his shorts on the East Coast and away from Sennett’s interference. They’re not at a level with what Chaplin was doing for Mutual at the same time, but are plenty good runners-up. Roscoe’s placement as second only to Charlie in popularity polls is borne out by subjects like The Waiter’s Ball and He Did and He Didn’t. The move he’d make to Joseph Schenck’s Comique series would yield comedies even more impressive and partnership for Arbuckle with new to films Buster Keaton.

Again would credit be deflected away from Roscoe, this time in Keaton’s direction. Of twenty comedies Arbuckle made for Schenck (and Paramount release), fourteen also featured Buster. Most were shot in the East. Keaton literally walked in off the street and went to work. He’d been a vaudeville headliner but knew films would be his future. Recruiting comedy’s next genius was Roscoe’s advantage for the two years they’d work together. Writer/director Arbuckle liked everyone to pitch in. His Comiques are far less the insistent one-man shows that Chaplin was doing at Mutual. Fatty’s stock company, other than Keaton, came over with him from Sennett. There was a nephew, Al St. John, to play the menace, and few were so menacing as this apparent escapee from asylum grounds. St. John looked like the demented brother Conrad Nagel kept hidden. Most of his teeth went missing, and ones he had were none too appealing. He always looked dirty. Alice Lake was the girl. Sometimes she’d have lots to do, others she’d be near invisible. Roscoe liked to improvise and welcomed distraction. He’d throw ideas against the wall to see which ones would stick. The earlier Comiques might start off one place and conclude in another, as though a pair of one-reelers had been pasted together. Arbuckle played safe and hewed to Sennett-inspired formula much of the time, only now with bigger budgets he’d empty the whole flour barrel instead of mere face-fulls of it. Roscoe taught Buster but ended up learning more as Keaton quickly mastered film forms. The shorts got better as BK found footing. His hand is evident in gags more evolved than ones Fatty staged at Keystone. Acrobatics on Keaton and St. John's part seem beyond capabilities of mere mortals. Were these men or mythic titans come to life? I swear I saw them fly on more than one breathtaking occasion. Note the beach pyramid here. There’s not an ounce of fat on Buster and Al. Those arms look like steel cable. Fatty’s nickname belied the tower of strength he was. Few men half his size moved so adroitly. Keaton liked to toy with camera tricks and spoof plot conventions others took seriously. Watch The Bell Boy, Good Night Nurse, or Backstage and you’ll see why Buster would later move right into his own starring series for Schenck. Both Keaton and St. John acknowledged Arbuckle as the man who gave them careers in film. Al was said to tear up whenever Roscoe’s name was mentioned. He would go on to starring groups of his own for various companies through the twenties, a trade ad for one of them shown here. Kino and Image have released the Comiques in two competing DVD sets. You’ll need both to get the best viewing experience, as print quality varies from title to title. There are several shorts in the Image box that aren’t available from Kino. The back and forth is well worth your effort in the end, for this is one of the richest groups of silent comedies around.

Joseph M. Schenck bartered Arbuckle to Paramount in much the same way he would Buster Keaton to MGM in 1928. It was time for Roscoe to graduate. He’d work henceforth at corporate headquarters. That meant properties selected for him and directors to whom he’d answer. The retooled Fatty received an astronomical one thousand dollars a day, and would seemingly work twenty-five hours of each. The first eight months saw seven features completed. People wondered how he kept the pace. Roscoe spent his money on cars and hootch and whatever barnacles attached themselves to his star. Paramount promised (or was a better word threatened?) real stories with logical development. Poster copy (shown here) for his first, The Round-Up, read Nobody Loves A Fat Man, chilling prophesy in light of what lay in wait that Labor Day weekend of 1921. Fatty was like a big ripe watermelon waiting to be busted open. The happy caravan snaking into his rooms at the St. Francis found him lubed and vulnerable to all manners of extortion. The sex assault he was said to have inflicted upon sometimes actress Virginia Rappe led to a manslaughter charge after she died several days later. There were multiple trials and Roscoe was acquitted, but tawdry aspects of that party assured public censure and got him off screens nationwide. Notwithstanding criminal charges, the perception of wrongdoing might have been enough to do Roscoe in. Gangsters and tipplers could laugh off the Volstead Act. The rest of us, including picture people, were expected to abide by it. A debauched Fatty in pajamas sipping bootlegged cocktails for breakfast was no fit subject for child viewing. Has any personality paid a higher price for exercising poor judgment than Arbuckle? As to guilt or innocence, modern accounts call it a frame at best and a monstrous act on the part of corrupt authorities. Some of Roscoe’s colleagues disagreed and vilified him to the end. Actress Miriam Cooper was friends with Lowell Sherman, who’d made the fateful drive with Arbuckle to San Francisco and was there for the infamous party. She claimed in a 1973 memoir that Sherman's account as privately conveyed to her and husband Raoul Walsh squarely put blame on Roscoe for Rappe’s death, despite the fact he’d previously gone on record maintaining the comedian’s innocence (I think Lowell was bought off, she said, In fact, I’m sure of it). Pretty damning account, but how reliable were Miriam Cooper’s recollections some fifty years following the event?

Roscoe was shut out of theatres (other than touring vaudeville), but found work directing other comics. Some of these shorts have been unearthed and are part of Laughsmith’s DVD set. All the ones I’ve watched are excellent. I wonder how much participation Arbuckle had in Buster Keaton’s features. He’s said to have helped out on Sherlock, Jr. All nine Paramount features saw release in Europe, outdistancing the scandal that dogged Arbuckle here. Leap Year was among several never shown in the US, but remarkably turned up in Paramount vaults during the late sixties and was turned over to the American Film Institute. It’s more fascinating than funny, and shows the new direction Arbuckle was headed. The comedy is gentler and more situational. You could argue this was just Fatty being polished to a dull sheen, and indeed, if nine such features had been released as scheduled, he’d have been at the least overexposed. Would Roscoe have eventually gained back control of his image and work? It’s likelier he’d have gone on as artist for hire. Arbuckle was never accorded respect Chaplin enjoyed, and had not the business acumen of a Harold Lloyd. One critic summed it up --- Charlie Chaplin is a genius, Roscoe Arbuckle merely a clown. Some will dispute that. Roscoe rescuers say he’s at the least a comic visionary, and they’ve got rediscovered Arbuckle films to back it up. Watch Love, one of his Comique shorts made while Keaton was on a WWI service hitch and you’ll see Roscoe the creator in full flower. By whose standard do we anoint genius in films? It must be a largely subjective one. For whatever reason, I tend to think of Chaplin as a brilliant and hard-working inventor of comedy, while Keaton I consider --- a genius. Roscoe to me is funny and endearing and sometimes inspired. If he were a genius (or if I accepted other’s designation of him as such), I might not enjoy him as much. Look at Fatty’s stuff and he’ll grow on you. I’m wanting someone to release the other Paramount features said to have survived. They include The Round-Up, Life Of The Party, The Traveling Salesman, and Gasoline Gus. A lot of those Comique shorts were considered lost until fairly recently. Their availability has served Roscoe's legacy well, but what of Camping Out, the one most lately found? Is there room in a forthcoming DVD collection for it? I’m optimistic of even more Arbuckle turning up in foreign archives. Any rediscovery is bound to be a happy one. What’s more satisfying than really good comedy seeing projection light again after eighty-five plus years?

A Week Gone Cartoon Mad

Sometimes when I’m grooving with cartoons, I’ll say to myself, Why not just move into these and leave the rest alone? A lot of collectors have. They look at animation and little else. Cartoons are colorful and seductive and the best of them make live action seem staid by comparison. Those Looney Tunes Golden Collections are like bags of chips where the first one you consume dissolves quickly to thirty-five or so cartoons I watched this week. The panel of experts behind DVD extras (along with informative websites several of them maintain) made me aware of rivalries and resentments those WB animation directors harbored over lifetimes. For decades, it didn’t matter so much who introduced Bugs Bunny. It was probably as well so little praise was bestowed upon artists during those (amazingly) prolific peak years, for too many slaps on the back might have gone to their heads, or at the least slowed them down (and its surprising how minimal was Warners' trade support compared with Disney, Metro, and even Columbia). With the seventies and its inaugural crop of serious animation historians (most of them still very active, by the way), the question of credit for Bugs and other characters became vital bones of contention among Termite Terrace inmates then in their (mostly) early sixties. Sniping that went on among Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Tex Avery reminds me of high school feuds sustained long past urgency as to who threw that touchdown pass or kicked the winning field goal. These men who’d once animated as much for fun as money now staked claims in deadly earnest to Bugs, Porky, and Daffy. Carefree home movies taken on the Warner lot in the thirties contrasted sharply with selective recalling interviews and bitter rebuttals that followed. Clampett told his story to Michael Barrier for Funnyworld magazine and on screen in 1975’s Bugs Bunny Superstar. Jones hit the ceiling and induced Avery to add his signature to a poison-penned manifesto Chuck wrote in defense of he and Tex’s seminal work on cartoons made forty years prior. Subsequent memoirs and career profiles were laced with snubs and hatchets. You’d not call it a blood feud among these gray eminences … more like a pen and ink one. Fans got caught in the middle. They were either on Chuck’s side or agin’ him, and Jones kept score. His ego demanded first placement. Maybe that came of staying active in the business longer than the others. Some of Avery’s spirit had been knocked out by personal loss (a son) and being put on the shelf by studios no longer making his kind of quality cartoons. The latter was so for Clampett as well. His own son was barely aware of the greatness Dad achieved at Warners, thanks to Blue Ribbon syndicated prints with titles shorn of Bob’s credit. LA kid fans teenaged and in their twenties were welcomed guests at rancho Clampett where Bob watched his old cartoons with them and dragged out original animation cels he’d squirreled whenever they had questions. It was through such hospitality that Clampett secured his immortality, for many a youthful Boswell went on to write animation histories we refer to today.

Many of the faithful watch cartoons alone. Adults more casually interested burn out after one or two. Mavens who mean business were raised on plates-full running an hour if not more. That’s at least six at a sitting, which I can do standing on my head thanks to non-stop childhood TV exposure. The shared cartoon experience is pretty much lost now that so many are on DVD. Animation festivals that used to play crowded theatres are kaput. Kid matinees wash further out into memory. An ad shown here promised bingo in addition to a numbing onslaught of screen fare (topped off with The Invisible Boy!). This exhibitor poised between twin towers of 35mm cartoons is preparing to haul twenty reels and cans up to the booth for what looks to be a strenuous day for projectionists. Back then they’d sometimes let you in for bottle caps. Enough of them might be rewarded with a bike prize such as one here for which its winner appears to have redeemed half a million RC Cola tops at least. Such promotion lured crowds not unlike these queued up for A Lawless Street and the heaven only knows how many Bugs and Daffys said mob sat through once inside. Shows I attended were punk beside these, as the bloom was off the rose of such marathons by stripped down Saturday bills of my youth. Coming late to the party meant I had to bring my own cartoons. By the seventies, a few of them were being pirated on 16mm. I’d drop my Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (bought for $35 from an obscure post office box in California) into any number of campus shows secure in the knowledge that classmates would never have seen it before (query to experts --- was Coal Black ever shown on TV with the others? --- my print had an AAP logo and the 16mm negative was apparently made up for the package going to local stations --- does anyone recall seeing it?). One time a fraternity (not mine) ran King Kong for one of those drunken gymatorium blanket affairs (site of my own 8mm Phantom Of the Opera debacle) and made the mistake of renting a Road Runner Parade reel from, I think, Audio-Brandon. Now one R.R. is great --- two might get by --- but this program featured four in grueling succession, overkill that engendered dangerously hostile reaction among co-ed coyotes several sheets to impatient winds. As a collector, I learned quickly that not all Warner cartoons are created equal. A wise sage once noted that of the thousand or so they made, one third were good, another third OK, and the rest dogs. Fair assessment? I wouldn’t know, not having made a clean viewing sweep of the library, though as long as I’m putting out questions to those more expert in this area than myself (and there are lots of you, I know), here’s another one: Were post-1953 Warner cartoons supposed to shown in 1.85 widescreen? I assume theatres played them with the same masking used for feature programs, and by the mid-fifties, wide apertures would have been standard for virtually all shows. WB cartoons I see on DVD are always full-frame. Are these cropped and missing information on the sides? Most look right enough to me, but I can’t help wondering…

Kids don’t appear to be watching Warner cartoons anymore. Their popularity had a long run, but I’d say Looney Tunes are over but for nostalgia probes. One look at so-called animated features today explains it. The current crop doesn’t look like cartoons as I knew them. Pixar is aggressive and dimensional in ways that are unnerving. I’m always afraid they’re going to fly off the screen and engulf me like the Fiend Without a Face. Daffy and Porky operated at a safer distance. Pixar invades my space. Vintage cartoons look prosaic beside such hard chargers. Do they generate all this stuff on computers? Do cartoons even involve drawing anymore? Maybe the term itself is archaic. Go back to cels and paints and you might as well hire Ray Harryhausen to dig out his Cyclops and have another run at Dynamation (wish they would). I looked at one of the cartoon message boards to see if anyone shows Warner cartoons on television now. Sad to say they mostly don’t, unless it’s three in the morning and even those come and go with scheduling vagaries favoring current merchandise. What cruel spin of fate took WB’s out of general circulation just when the company got them looking so pristine after years of abuse and neglect? When cartoons started getting rediscovered in the seventies, prints available required patience and allowance for faded color, replaced titles, and inventory split among multiple owners. Look at Bugs Bunny --- Superstar or that Camera Three special (extras on DVD) and imagine how the former and its Blue Ribbon content would have looked blown up on theatre screens in the mid-seventies. The other day I watched a 1940 Chuck Jones called Tom Thumb In Trouble on DVD. The quality was astounding, just as it is on every cartoon that rolls off the Golden Collection line, with color beyond rich and doubtlessly sharper than audiences in 1940 received it. How did we become such fans watching black-and-white prints of this and so many others way back when? These DVD’s are for me like taking off clouded glasses worn for years and seeing everything clearly for the first time.

We remember them. They’re burned in our minds, says Jerry Beck during one of the DVD interviews. My own recall of cartoons is less specific. Most I saw young are a blur of theme music and arresting openers. I didn’t consider individual titles until 16mm collecting sent me in quest of those few available. Tom Dunnahoo at Thunderbird Films discovered some that had slipped into the public domain, thus Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur plus a few others turned up on sales lists in 1972 (the year its copyright protection would have lapsed). Piratical providers (those P.O. boxes again) enabled me to acquire Slick Hare and the aforementioned Coal Black shortly after. That aroused darker impulses to somehow lay hands upon favorites I was seeing on television. One fateful morning during freshman year, Hollywood Steps Out turned up on a nearby UHF channel. Boy, was this a great cartoon! Somehow I just had to have it. Well, the station was less than an hour away. Why not drive down and try my luck? This seemed a constructive excuse for cutting classes that day, so off I went with a friend in his Ford Pinto. We located the goat pasture address of said independent broadcaster and gained surprisingly immediate entry to their film library. The place was garlanded with cartoons. Racks and rows of them. A Solomon’s temple of animated booty. I made my pitch, mindful withal of the very real possibility they’d summon cops and I’d be posting bail with what little cash I’d brought to achieve an admittedly nefarious end. Discussions proceeded in hushed tones. What if I were a distributor plant working deep undercover to ensnare potential backdoor Merrie Melodies merchants? That might have occurred to them. After all, I was a stranger bent upon a bizarre mission. Weren’t nineteen-year olds more typically engaged at chugging beer, faking ID’s, and other such healthier enterprise? To my delighted satisfaction, the film editor’s assistant’s assistant (just what his precise function was I’ll never know) made medicine and we got together on Hollywood Steps Out, Coo-Coo Nut Grove, and oh yes, one more he unspooled on the desktop viewer, Bacall To Arms. You might as well take this too. We could never show it on television!, he said after observing a blackface gag and Rochester-inspired My, Oh, My! which closes the cartoon. Surreptitious removal was achieved by way of my benefactor’s lunchbag, from which he removed a pimento cheese sandwich and banana before secreting the three small reels within for our discreet exit. I spent the rest of college running them to death in both classrooms and commons (sometimes for course credit!). My conscience was clear as only a collector’s could be in those days when owning films branded us all criminals in the eyes of studios and squads of law enforcement acting at their behest. Certainly there were moral compasses thrown further askew than my own, but we were all products of tumultuous times and relaxed ethics where film collecting was concerned. I thank Warners for enabling me to now walk a straighter path cleared by cartoons finally available to those of us who revere them, though I may yet go in search of a lunch bag deep enough to conceal all those Boskos and Buddys I’m still waiting for ...