I was blessed with permissive parents. Unlike the more responsible mothers and fathers of this modern age who monitor their offspring's access to the demon television, mine would let me watch until my eyes bled. And none of it seems to have done me any harm. (Those who know me well are either snickering or shaking their heads in sadness at this point.)
Despite my advanced years, I still love a good, clever cartoon, the more subtly subversive the better. And now that I'm blessed with that greatest benefit that age, experience and the respect of my peers may bring (a healthy disposable income), I can revert just a little (okay, a lot) and capture images of my favorite characters. Herewith, some images from my collection of cartoon cels.
This is the first cel I ever owned, purchased from a tiny ad
in the Los Angeles Times. As I recall, Hanna Barbera donated a
bunch of these to Compton High School in L.A., which then sold
them as a fundraiser. I've always had a soft spot for Hanna
Barbera. (Huckleberry Hound is the first HB show I can
remember, with Yogi Bear close behind.) Unlike the Warner
Brothers cartoons, mostly theatrical productions that were old
long before I got to them, Hanna Barbera created new characters
and new cartoons for television. The quality was inferior,
owing to the economics of animation for the tube, but of course
I was far too young and undiscriminating to care or even notice.
In fact, I recall one series of the time called Space Angel that
was really low budget: instead of frame-by-frame
animation, they used a series of paintings onto which they
superimposed a real actor's lips moving to the dialogue!
I became hooked on Rocky, Bullwinkle et al. long before I
understood more than a fraction of what Jay Ward and company
were pulling off. I knew that there was major silliness going
on, which was all I needed to know. Years later I heard about
the Dudley Doright Emporium, still plugging away on Sunset
Boulevard. And I knew that someday I'd have to make the
pilgrimage to Los Angeles and stand under the giant Bullwinkle.
When I eventually moved to L.A. I did visit the Emporium. And
this cel is the result. The proprietress (I believe she was
Jay's wife) asked if I wanted it autographed, since Jay was
working in the studio next door. I said yes. (I didn't have it
personalized, since I was thinking of it as a baby gift for my
manager. In the end I kept it, which was just as well: said
manager was a selfish jackass.) Jay Ward died just a couple of
months after my visit to the Emporium. The world is a far
duller place without him.
I discovered DangerMouse on Nickelodeon. (Yes, I used to watch
Nickelodeon. I might do so today if my local cable company
didn't have such high prices and a miserable selection
of channels. But that's beside the point.) On the one hand,
DangerMouse is a remarkably low budget, limited animation
cartoon with frequently incomprehensible dialogue. (I'm pretty
good at understanding foreigners
speaking English. But some of those Scots accents defeat even
me.) On the other hand is its sense of humor, which is
decidedly low. (This is a good thing.) And on a third hand are
all the references I love: to James Bondian superspies,
megalomaniacal villains and plots and improbable gadgets, to
Sherlock Holmes (DangerMouse and his
cowardly hamster sidekick Penfold live in a letterbox in front
of 221B Baker Street) and to all that is wonderful about the
British (Gilbert & Sullivan, plots to drown the world in
custard). Even the theme music is perfectly overblown. So when
I found a collection of DangerMouse cels in a movie memorabilia
shop in London's Soho, I couldn't
resist. (Apologies for the quality of the scan. The low budget
of this cartoon extends to the cels used to produce it. I had
to scan the cel from a variety of directions and then try to put
together an image from the bits that didn't create
strange lighting problems.)
Thank you, Steven Spielberg. Thank you for bringing new cartoons
to weekday afternoons. (And thank you, Akio Morita, for giving
us VCRs so those of us with jobs can watch them.) In addition
to Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and such, Spielberg was
responsible for Tiny Toon Adventures and the subtler, more adult
and far more subversive Animaniacs. A 90s version of Rocky
& Bullwinkle with much better production values, this is a
series to keep both kids and adults on their toes. From
historical references (a episode concerning Rasputin's toothache
has a character calling for anesthesia; a little girl in a
Russian dress comes out) to musical theatre parody (the
Goodfeathers doing Pigeon On The Roof; Rita & Runt as
Les
Miseranimals), this is a show that swings for the rafters.
And there are jokes hidden everywhere; I'd suggest taping it and
watching with your finger on the pause button. The cel on the
left is from Space Probed, a satire on every alien abduction
plot ever made. I bought it and had it autographed during the
voice actors' visit to my
local Warner Brothers Studio Store. (Here's the bit of autograph cut off from
the image.) The cel on the right was made for the studio
store and not for an episode. That means that it's not much of
an investment. But then that's not why I started collecting nor
why I keep at it.
Pinky & The Brain, two lab mice with dreams of world
domination. Well, one dreams of world domination. The
other's interests head in a rather different direction:
The tone here is just a little more adult than Animaniacs, from
which these two spun off to their own show. Takeoffs on The
Shadow radio series, a black & white tribute to The Third
Man, a parody of Man Of La Mancha. (Brain sings of his quest
To Scheme The
Improbable Scheme.) Clearly too sophisticated for the WB
Network's prime time audience. Then again, who expected Fox to
have a hit with The Simpsons?
I think The Simpsons has the most inspired humor on television today.
(Which either says a lot for their writers or very little for the
competition.) This is a program that's so clever on so many levels:
as a look at the contemporary American family that's far more accurate
for its time than Leave It To Beaver or Donna Reed was for the 50s, no
matter how hard we try to romanticize it; as a consideration of our
relation to our concept of God and religion; as media and political
satire,
with a special mention to the annual Halloween episodes; as a revival
of musical comedy, although not necessarily in a form that Rogers &
Hammerstein would appreciate. Bart and Lisa may be extreme examples of
childhood archetypes, but they're far more believable as children and
siblings than anything the other networks have created. And I never
know what to expect, as when Homer's birthday gift to Marge of a bowling
ball (engraved with his name) turns into a brilliant recreation
of the final scene of An Officer And A Gentleman, from which the cel at
right comes. You have to admire a family that works. And The Simpsons,
for all their antisocial or just asocial tendencies, work better than
most.
(A small admission: unlike the rest of my collection, the two Simpson cels were purchased in part so I could write about the series. And it also gave me a change to experience first hand the excitement of an eBay auction. If you haven't been bitten by the eBay bug you don't know what you're missing!)
Take me home:
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Let's go traveling:
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Comments to Hank Shiffman, Mountain View, California
