Kevin's View: The Shimmering, Glimmering Jim Tyer

Jim Tyer's twisted sense of anatomy and movement
is clearly evident in the above sequence



FOREWORD FROM RACHEL:

The recent "Terrytoons Double Bill" prompted some fascinating insights from Kevin on the strange, almost ethereal nature of Terrytoons animation. In my review of THE POWER OF THOUGHT, I put forward the theory that Terry's animators existed in a sort of time warp, retaining the straight-ahead, unpredictable style that by the 1940's was considered "old hat" at most studios. Seeing some of the earliest efforts produced by Amadeé Van Buren only confirmed it for me--in such cartoons as the 1929 SUMMERTIME, there existed an almost total disregard for such things as weight or dimension--characters would thrust their heads toward the camera from across a room, appearing for seconds at a time to be horrendously off-model (assuming there was even such a thing as "off-model"--or on--in that era) only to snap back a moment later. Such a glaring disregard for anatomy and logic seems careless to our modern eyes, but it gave those early Van Buren cartoons an "otherworldliness" rivaled only by Fleischer.

Paul Terry, who had worked for Van Buren on the AESOP'S FABLES cartoons as a director in the 1920's, carried that sense of animated characters as "pure cartoon" with him when he struck out on his own, and he imparted that attitude to those who worked for him. No one exemplified that feeling of "anything can happen" quite like his key animator Jim Tyer, whose characters often seemed as if they had no anatomy at all, floating effortlessly through the animated landscape. Model sheets merely served as a "suggestion" for Tyer, who would adhere to them--or not--as his whim dictated.

Kevin elaborates on that devil-may-care quality in Tyer's work in this installment of KEVIN'S VIEW. Though his comments are brief, he gets at the heart of what made Terrytoons visually unique:

Kevin's View
by Kevin Wollenweber

It (THE MAGIC PENCIL) kinda brings back memories of Terrytoon art. Yes, even Paul Terry's cartoons could be somewhat magic. I'd like to someday talk to John Kricfalusi and find out just why he likes Terrytoons. I have my own vague reasons-vague, because I can't outline actual scenes as to why I like some of the visuals in a Terrytoons cartoon.

There is this almost chilling thing that happens sometimes in a
Terrytoon-it often happens a lot more fluidly at other studios when a character has high voltage driven through him. Remember that BUGS BUNNY cartoon in which Bugs believes that dogs who are racing are after a real live rabbit and he goes to somehow caress the electronic bunny, only to get a sizzling dose of high voltage sent through him? Well, Terry would do this with characters at odd moments, and most of those moments don't have anything to do with high voltage but might represent a character suddenly getting angry or just suddenly feeling strangely.

Somewhere, there exists a print of a PERCY & ROQUEFORT cartoon in which Percy, the cat, comes in contact again and again with catnip and has this strange reaction, and this includes the most surreal shimmering. I wish someone knew what you call this technique. To some it might appear to be a cheap shortcut or an instance in which the animators in question didn't know what they were doing because the effect looks a bit jumpy, but it is no doubt meant to be that way as a kind of surreal slow burn. It must be an interesting effect to freeze and examine, frame by frame, like those riveting Tex Avery takes.

RACHEL'S RESPONSE

Like Kevin, when viewing these cartoons as a child, I was at a loss for words to describe what I was seeing when viewing a Tyer scene. "Shimmering" is perhaps the best term I've heard--when Tyer's characters would go into a take, they would do precisely the opposite of what Avery's would do in that situation--instead of stretching like putty, they'd seemingly contract into themselves, literally shrinking for perhaps a quarter of a second, just long enough to be perceptible. Then, just as quickly, they'd resume their original form, much like the characters in the Van Buren cartoon--except that Tyer was doing this in 1950.

Kevin makes comparisons to Tex Avery, but I would go further and compare him to Rod Scribner at Warner's. Scribner, as you've no doubt seen in such cartoons as GRUESOME TWOSOME and THE HEP CAT, liked to vibrate his characters to a stop, exaggerating the laws of inertia and giving them a "cartoony" spin. Tyer could do this well--
Mark Myerson, in his 1990's APATOONS article on Tyer, uses the fight scene from the 1945 Popeye cartoon SHAPE AHOY as an example of Tyer using such a technique logically, for dramatic effect.

But Tyer didn't always use such techniques logically, particularly in his years at Terrytoons. The "ladder" scene in THE POWER OF THOUGHT is almost certainly Tyer's, for when Heckle causes a fireman's ladder to issue forth from his bare hands, it vibrates as it goes up, almost as if it were straining to expand. Illogical, yet logical at the same time.

The Rod Scribner Project blog, while being generally complimentary of Tyer, criticizes his seeming lack of control in comparison to Scribner. Though, as the frames below illustrate, Tyer knew precisely what he was doing, adding vitality to what in anyone else's hands would have been a rather mundane "sneak" cycle. Note the limbs seem as if they're dislocated, yet this quirky little sequence couldn't better describe Percy the cat's emotions. Viewed in motion, the expansion and contraction of his body creates precisely the shimmering effect Kevin speaks of:



In all, Tyer's animation sequences more often than not lifted Terrytoons above the commonplace, "shimmering" like the animated jewels they were.


Tags: Jim+Tyer, shimmering, Terrytoons, Kevin's+View, Rod+Scribner+Project, Mark+Myerson
Rachel's+Response

(Edited 4/23/07 for spelling and minor "tweaking" of content--R.)

A Terrytoons Double Bill, Part 2: Today's Lesson--Don't Give Two Cartoon Magpies THE POWER OF THOUGHT (1949)

The Power of Thought
Director: Eddie Donnelly
Release Date: Jan. 1949
In short: Heckle and Jeckle become self-aware, and try out their newfound power...

Cartoons at their best have always acknowledged the magical nature of the medium. If the artist can draw it, it can happen.

The earliest animators knew this, even before Gertie The Dinosaur bounded on-screen. In the experimental animation of Emile Cohl and J.S. Blackton, one object would morph into another in stream-of-consciousness fashion. The animated versions of Winsor McKay's comic-strip characters inexplicably changed shape and form, stretching and contracting like putty. In an early J.R. Bray film, THE ARTIST'S DREAM, the artist's creation (a cartoon dachsund) gorges on a plate of sausages until it bursts.

Throughout the twenties and into the thirties, impossibility reigned. Max Fleischer took us into nightmare worlds with hallucinatory fantasies like BIMBO'S INITIATION and MINNIE THE MOOCHER. In the former, a knife blade perilously close to Bimbo's rump sprouts eyes, a mouth, and a tongue as it licks its lips in anticpation. Should Betty Boop's dress come close to falling down (and it did quite a lot) a screen might come to life and discreetly "walk" in front of her to protect her modesty.

Even Disney's early films played with the possibilities of the medium--he had made his name with films in which a live-action little girl cavorted with pen-and-ink drawings, after all. In an early Mickey Mouse cartoon, THE BARN DANCE, clumsy dancer Mickey continually steps on poor Minnie's feet, his own feet growing with every step to illustrate his awkwardness. Her poor legs stretched hopelessly out of shape, Minnie merely snips off the excess with a pair of scissors, and ties the ends in a knot.

But Disney eventually chose to concentrate on personality and "realism", and by the mid-thirties even the Fleischer cartoons had followed suit. While this did a great deal to make animated characters seem like living, breathing individuals, it also stripped animated cartoons of the one great advantage it had over live-action. It took a rebellion by the likes of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett for cartoon studios to relearn how to be "cartoony."

Not Terrytoons. For them there was nothing to "relearn", since they'd never abandoned their now quaint "anything can happen" style. The studio existed in a sort of vacuum--their stories, gags, drawing style and even music stayed remarkably the same, year after year.

On the one hand, this attitude nearly doomed the studio to stagnation, on the other, it had the unexpected benefit of making Terrytoons a "time capsule" of sorts, preserving the freeform storylines and nonsensical animation of the silent and early sound eras. (As we've already seen in THE MAGIC PENCIL.) There seemed little reason to change: Terry generally ignored industry trends unless--naturally--they made money.

In the mid-forties, characters like Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker were doing just that, so it didn't take long for Terry to put his own spin on them. Given a vague directive to do something involving "twins", Terry's artists came up with two wisecracking magpies, soon to be named Heckle and Jeckle. Strangely, in what's generally regarded to be their debut cartoon, THE TALKING MAGPIES (1946), the main characters are an unnamed magpie and his wife "Maggie", whose constant arguing disturbs neaby Farmer Al Falfa. They soon vanish from the story, and two other unnamed magpies take over.

They were, however, officially named later that year and launched in a series of their own. The majority were undistinguished: if Woody Woodpecker was an imitation Bugs Bunny, Heckle and Jeckle were an imitation Woody Woodpecker--split in two at that.

The ones that stood out, however, combined the raucous, wiseguy sensibility of the Warner's and Lantz cartoons with the freewheeling impossibility of the silents. THE POWER OF THOUGHT is one such cartoon: it dawns on Jeckle (for the record, Jeckle is the one with the British accent) that as cartoon characters, he and Heckle can do anything they think of. With great power, in this case, comes disaster, as they run afoul of a bulldog cop--who soon beomes their unfortune victim. For awhile, that is.

Curious? Then read on the for synopsis of THE POWER OF THOUGHT:

(Note: I know Heckle and Jeckle never addressed each other by name in the classic Terry
cartoons--but did in the later, Bill Weiss installments. Since I have to differentiate the two
somehow, for the purposes of this review, the British-accented one is Jeckle. That's my story and I'm sticking to it...R.)

The opening titles on the tape I have, I suspect, were not the originals--they look like the standard TV release titles in which Terry's name is missing (Terrytoons of this period were usually prefaced by a title that read "Paul Terry Presents.")

The title cuts alarmingly quickly to Jeckle lying in bed, which makes me believe there had been some rather clumsy editing. He sits with his legs crossed, dangling one foot. The scene cuts to a medium shot to reveal Heckle, who's sleeping in the same bed. Jeckle shakes him to wake him up. "You know, I've been lying here thinking," he says.


"With what, chum?" replies his eternally sarcastic friend.

We go back to a closeup shot of Jeckle. "Brains, old boy, brains..." Jeckle says, pointing to the top of his head.

The scene changes again, to a medium shot of the two of them. "Well, what have you been thinking about?" Heckle says.

Lounging with his hands behind his head, Jeckle says, "We cartoon characters can have a wonderful life, if we only take advantage of it. We can do anything we think of!"

"What do ya mean, chum?" Heckle says.

"Well, supposing I want to be a mouse," Jeckle replies. "Click! I'm a mouse..." As he says this he snaps his fingers, and indeed transforms into a mouse, with what might be called a "morphing" effect now. Mouse-Heckle then says, "Supposing I want to be myself again. Click! I'm myself again." He snaps his fingers, and turns back to his old self. He turns his head to the left of the screen and leans back with a self-satisfied smile. "Go ahead, give me something hard to do!"

More than up to the challenge, Heckle says, "OK, I like music. I bet you can't be a one-man band..."

"Why, of course I can," Jeckle says, and shrinks until he disappears.

He reappears--seeming to "grow" from out of nowhere--in the next scene, his arms raised like a conductor. I rather liked this effect, since it's a bit smoother than an abrupt cut in which he suddenly appears. "Ready?" he says.

A piano appears in front of Jeckle...we see him from the back of the instrument as he pounds out a simple boogie vamp. The piano disappears, seemingly absorbed into the floor. A trombone takes it's place, and Jeckle continues the boogie melody, his trombone pointed up in the air toward the right of the screen. He turns around briefly and faces the viewer holding a violin. It then dissolves to a set of drums, and Jeckle plays a lively drum solo.



Heckle, still in bed, jumps up and the camera follows him to the right as he starts to dance. This scene, incidentally, left me wondering if the scene had been retraced from earlier (possibly Mighty Mouse) cartoons, as the dance he was doing looked vaguely familiar. We cut back to Jeckle on drums--then back to trombone, then a trumpet, and back to drums again. (A missed opportunity here--he could have split into several versions of himself and done a really frenetic number, Tex Avery-style).


Cut to a medium shot of the bed as our heroes hop back in, emerging from the right of the screen.

"Say, that's great!" Heckle says, "How do you do it?" Jeckle just shrugs slightly and says, "I just think about it, and then it happens."

Above: Jeckle, the one-man--uh, magpie band....

We hear a dramatic chord on the sound track as Heckle says, "Do you suppose I could do it?" he says, pointing to himself. The wheels are definitely turning.

"Certainly--what would you like to do?" Jeckle asks.

Jeckle places his finger on top of his head, thinking for a moment. "I think I'd like to take a bath," he finally decides. With a snap of Jeckle's fingers, the scene changes and we find them both in a bathtub.

"Boy, this is grand!", Jeckle says, testing the water with his finger. "And just the temperature I like, too!" The camera angle changes slightly, to a three-quarter view of the tub, as he's saying
this.

Jeckle says, "Would you like to go for a swim now?"

"Boy, I sure would," Jeckle answers. The camera angle changes back to the original medium shot, showing all of the bathtub and our two heroes within. Jeckle says, "Well, just lengthen the tub and go ahead..."

They turn to the right, assuming swimming positons. They swim along in synch with each other, the tub expanding as they go. (They'd have been a hit at the Olympics if synchronized swimming existed then). Eventually it expands beyond the confines of their home: we cut to an exterior shot as the wall cracks and gives way, and the stretching tub pushes through.



Cut to the sidewalk below, where a bulldog cop stands watch at a corner, twirling his billy club.
(You know, it's impossible to write that without making it sound dirty somehow...) A few drops splash down from the drain of ever-growing tub above him. (Accentuated by a slight musical trill on the sound track).

Looking up at our heroes just off-camera, the cop shakes his fist and yells, "Hey! What's goin' on up there?"

Cut to Heckle and Jeckle peering over the edge of the tub. Spying the cop just out of viewing range, Heckle raises himself up slightly and says, "Uh-oh!" They make a quick retreat back toward their apartment building, as the tub contracts back into the gaping hole in the wall. Once the tub is back inside, the hole in the wall seals up on its own.

Before the tub fully contracts, however, one end drops down, causing it to dump its entire load of water on the poor unsuspecting cop, soaking him. As soon as the hole seals up, we cut quickly to the now-drenched cop below. Shaking his fist at our unseen heroes, he says, "I'll come up and
get you for this!"

The view changes to Heckle, looking down at the off-camera cop from an open window. "Okay, Chief," he says, pointing down with his finger, "just take the elevator."

The confused cop asks, "What elevator?" He doesn't have to wait long for the answer, as a section of the sidewalk on which he's standing starts rising in the air. We briefly cut to a shot of the window as Jeckle zips inside, and the cop zips into screen from the bottom of the frame.

Jeckle's quick exit is a nice little bit of "smear animation," which comes as a bit of surprise to me. I didn't know Terrytoons attempted anything that unusual--I suspect that particular sequence must have been animated by Jim Tyer, whose oddball animation style made him that studio's equivalent of Rod Scribner. (Kevin has a few things to say about Tyer in a future entry). The piece of sidewalk on which the cop stands bends downward a bit from the speed, making the bulldog a little unsteady on his feet.

A couple of quick cuts here, as we see Heckle looking at the glowering cop from the interior of the building. He slams the shutter, the blinds and closes the cutain--then "folds up" the window, widthwise and then lengthwise, until it disappears. Then to the exterior, where we see Jeckle enter into the scene from around the corner. "How is it up there?" he asks mockingly.

Another quick cut, a "worm's eye" view of the cop, still hovering in midair. "Get me down outta here!" he screams, fists clenched. Then back to Jeckle below, who "wills" a lever to appear, then pulls it.

Back to the cop above, as he plummets downward at incredible speed. The piece of sidewalk heads down so fast, the cop is momentarily suspended in midair, flailing a bit before he lands back onto it. Crouched on all fours, he has a panicked expression as he peers over the edge.

The cop and the section of sidewalk hit the ground with such force they end up several feet underground. Heckle (or Jeckle, it's unclear at this point) slides a wooden box marked DISHES over the gaping hole. We see brief evidence of a rumbling underneath the box as the cop speeds back upward--breaking through it, he again rises several stories, struggling to carry about a dozen or so dishes. The section of sidewalk comes to a sudden stop--the deceleration causes the cop to flip head-over-heels through the air, but he comes back down on his feet, rescuing the dishes.

"Get me down outta here!" the cop repeats to his off-camera tormenters.

Back on the ground, Jeckle, standing to the left of the screen, says "You heard the gentleman..."

Heckle, on the right, immediately produces a fireman-style ladder, which rises from his two hands. It vibrates slightly as it unfolds.

Back now to the cop, still in midair, as the ladder emerges from the bottom of the frame. He steps gingerly off the floating piece of concrete with his left foot as he continues to balance the dishes.

The piece of sidewalk wobbles slightly as he--just barely--makes it onto the top rung, dishes intact.

Unfortunately, the ladder comes apart--the rungs collapse on top of one another as he zooms downward, the camera following him all the while. On the ground, Heckle and Jeckle stare up gaping at the disaster about to occur. They duck and put their hands over their eyes as we hear an off-camera cymbal crash.Terrytoons still used musical instruments for the majority of their sound effects, even at this late date.

Cut to the dazed cop amid the debris of broken ladder and dishes. A cloud of dust rises in the air around him. He slowly rises and and disappears from the right of the frame, re-emerging in the next scene as he approaches the smug-looking magpies. He leans over them, fists clenched.

"Hey! What's this all about??" he shouts.

"We're cartoon characters," Jeckle says."We can do anything we think of. Just watch this..."

He proceeds to make a fist and waves his hand over it like a magician. He flicks his thumb, which immediately "lights" as if it were a match. Cupping his other hand and sticking his other thumb in his mouth, he sticks the flame down into his cupped hand and puffs as if he were smoking a pipe.

Jeckle casually blows some smoke as the dumbfounded cop looks on.

We cut to a close-up of the cop, who remarks, "Say, that's wonderful!" Unthinkingly, he flicks his own thumb, pointing to it with pride as it lights, not full aware of what he's just done. His thumb glows red-hot, and the heat quickly spreads down to the rest of his hand.

"Hey!" the cop shouts, when he realizes his entire hand has now burst into flame. As he waves it frantically to put it out, we go back to Heckle and Jeckle, who scramble around in circles yelling
"Water, water!!" Jeckle transforms into a hydrant as Heckle releases the water with a twist of a wrench.

Hydrant-Jeckle releases an enormous cascade of water toward the burning cop, the force of which sends the cop back what appears to be several yards.

We cut back to Heckle and Hydrant-Jeckle. Jeckle transforms back into himself and takes off with Heckle toward the right of the screen as the cop comes into view close behind them. We then move to a medium shot of Heckle and Jeckle running, then skidding to a stop. Jeckle morphs into a streetlight, which the pursuing cop instantly slams into, his momentum causing it to bend slightly. It snaps back, throwing the cop to the ground.

The streetlight morphs back into Jeckle, who says "See what I mean?"

The enraged cop tries to strike Jeckle several tmes with his billy club, but it has no effect, going through Jeckle as if he were transparent. The cop momentarily looks at his club, puzzled. As he does so, Jeckle suddenly disappears, and a set of footprints appear on the sidewalk from nowhere. The camera trucks right as the cop follows the moving footprints into an open grassy area. "I'm on the right track now", he comments to the audience.

How right he is, since a set of railroad tracks immediately appear beneath him. Oblivious, the cop continues sneaking along, then breaks into a run.

He skids to a stop, gaping in horror at the action off-screen. Cut to a shot of an anthropomorphic train--complete with "eyes"--barreling toward him. We cut to the cop, fleeing desperately to the left, then skidding to a stop again--hands over his eyes--as the train appears to run over him. He looks down to discover he's unharmed, and the tracks have disappeared.

Putting his hands on his hips, he remarks to the audience, "I don't get it!" He'll "get it," all right, as we cut to a medium shot of Heckle and Jeckle in a rowboat, "rowing" in mid-air. Jeckle sings "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" while Heckle rows, as we cut again to the cop. The shadow of our heroes' boat can be seen passing directly overhead. The boys' oars hit the cop on the back of the head, knocking him down. The cop goes into a fighting pose and draws his pistol, shooting at the
offscreen Heckle and Jeckle.

The bullets hit their rowboat, sending it falling and our heroes out of frame. One can see the two large gaping holes in the bottom as it plummets. Meanwhile, on the ground, the cop is still shooting into the air, only to be hit by the falling boat, which smashes to bits over his body.

The impact has forced the cop's Keystone Kops-style policeman's hat down over his eyes, almost all the way down to his bulldog jowls. He pulls the hat off his head and sits there in disgust. "It's about time I got some BRAINS knocked into my head," he says.



The cop gets up on his feet--we immediately change to a closeup shot of his noggin. Right on
cue, a large hammer appears and raps him several times on the skull. The cop likes it, it turns out, as he has a pleased--if somewhat goofy--look on his face. "Do it again! Do it again!" he shouts.

The hammer complies, hitting him a few more times on the head. His head vibrates slightly as thoughts clearly enter his mind (more Tyer animation, perhaps?)

"That's it--now I'm thinkin'!" he says. We cut to an extreme closeup of the top of the cop's head, as we see the clockwork gears in his brain tick away in a "cutaway" view.

The inner workings of a cartoon character's

mind...

Now "enlightened," the cop throws his pistol off-camera past the left of the frame. In the next shot we see it's grown enormous--it fires shot after shot as it moves under its own power across the screen, from right to left.

We cut again, this time to a medium shot of the panic-stricken magpies as they're pursued by the gigantic firing pistol. Soon, instead of bullets, a bear trap emerges from the barrel of the gun, which not only grabs Heckle and Jeckle as it clamps down, but morphs into a set of "stocks" on a wheelbarrow, ensnaring our heroes.

"I say, what happened?" the perplexed Jeckle says. "Yeah, what happened?" says Heckle.

Cut one last time to a close up of the cop, who says, "I'm a cartoon character too--and I've been doin' some thinkin' myself..." The vindicated cop winks at the audience.

Ah, yes--unlike poor, simple Gandy Goose, the boys are left to ponder their careless use of power as the cartoon irises out.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

"In one of these here cartoon pictures, a body can get away with anything," says the aged hillbilly of Tex Avery's A FEUD THERE WAS. The idea of the self-aware cartoon character was not new in 1949--Avery, Clampett and others had toyed with it in numerous cartoons--but to Avery, Clampett, et. al., it was nothing more than a throwaway joke. The artists at Terrytoons went one step further to build an entire cartoon around the concept--a fresh, clever twist for that time, particularly coming from the likes of Terrytoons.

I must say this cartoon is a pleasant surprise--in my dim memories of decades ago, this cartoon was quite lackluster, but it proved funnier and more rapid-fire than expected. Old studio hand Eddie Donnelly was no Tex Avery, certainly, but he did a more than passable job in executing the central premise. There was certainly faster action than I remembered, as well as more "extreme" poses and expressions. The cross-eyed, goofball look on the bulldog cop's face as he shouts "Do it again! Do it again!" is truly a sight to behold. This is THE MAGIC PENCIL done as it ought to have been, minus the faux Victorian melodrama, and with far more interesting characters. (Terry's curious obsession with Victorian melodrama parodies could probably comprise an entire post in itself). As I said in the introduction, it's Fleischeresque "old school" meets Warner's insanity--truly the best of both worlds.

THE POWER OF THOUGHT, like the postwar product of every other studio, shows the effect of cutbacks in production: fewer characters per frame, quicker cuts, having action take place off screen rather than on, and much more dialogue. Yet in Terrytoons' case, such cutbacks led to better cartoons, as the animators were forced to rev up the timing--they couldn't afford to linger on one scene very long. Terry's cartoons were now not only bizarre, but the weirdness came at you a mile a minute.

Yet I can't seem to shake the nagging feeling this cartoon needed something more. More of what, I can't be certain--more gags, faster pacing (though it was quite fast as it was, at least by Terry standards) more clever banter--maybe all of those things. The animators seemed at the same time to be restrained, yet champing at the bit to show what they could do. I suspect Terry's often unwelcome interference prevented this cartoon from being as funny as it could have been, but as it is, it's one of the rare standouts amid a flood of mediocrity.

It gives us a glimpse of the Terrytoons that might have been, had its artists been given as much control as those at Warner's, MGM and Lantz. (Much as the Gene Deitch cartoons would do
years later).

Not bad, old top, as Jeckle might have said.

Tags: Heckle+and+Jeckle, Terrytoons, Paul+Terry, The+Power+Of+Thought, orphan+toon

A Terrytoons Double Bill (Part 1): THE MAGIC PENCIL (1940)

The Magic Pencil
Director: Volney White
Music: Phillip Scheib
Release Date: Nov. 14, 1940

Before Heckle and Jeckle, before Mighty Mouse, and way before Deputy Dawg, there was Gandy Goose. For those who can remember seeing Terrytoons on television or in theaters--in vibrant color or grainy black and white--he hardly needs an introduction. But he does need a home, and has found one here at The Home For Orphan Toons.

Foolish but possessed of a wild imagination, his strange dreams provided fodder for most of his appearances. He was certainly the most promising character Terrytoons had created up to that time--before his first appearance in 1939, Terrytoons really had no star characters to speak of--unless you consider Farmer Al Falfa or Kiko The Kangaroo "star characters."

Though THE MAGIC PENCIL was not Gandy's first cartoon, it was the first to team him with the Durante-ish Sourpuss, a minor character previously seen in the color "one-shot" THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT. Say what you will about Terry, he knew a good thing when he saw one--and they remianed teamed for the remainder of their appearances (including a series of army adventures during WWII).

Like many cartoon characters of the classic era, Gandy's personality was "borrowed" from a radio comedian--in this case Ed Wynn--but whether entirely original or not, I must admit I have a soft spot for the little goofball. (According to the mostly reliable Leonard Maltin, Gandy's voice was provided by Wynn imitator Arthur Kay. I'll explain the "mostly" later on...)

Onetime Terrytoons employee Ralph Bakshi apparently had fond memories of Gandy as well: Bakshi's "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" series in one stroke parodied not only Gandy, but Marvel's revised Captain America origin story from the '60s. In the cartoon, Gandy is thawed out after having been frozen in an iceberg since World War II (like Cap) and has a little difficulty adjusting to the present, spending most of his time pining for his lost sidekick (also like Cap).

You might want to check out the copy of that particular episode ("The Ice Goose Cometh") on YouTube as a sort of refresher course.

Back already? Great. Then without further delay (I hope) I present to you THE MAGIC PENCIL:

The copy I was able to obtain (courtesy of Jerry Beck) was taken from a 16mm release print intended for home movie projectors. As such, there are no animator credits in the opening titles (there may not have been in the original print, but I have no way of knowing.) We open with a still of our "star", Gandy, with his name superimposed, which immediately dissolves to the title.

References to 20th Century-Fox, the studio's distributor, have been edited out, blacked out, or both.



We open with Gandy listening to lively swing music on the radio, clapping along and doing a silly little tap dance. The camera follows Gandy as he dances to the left, right in front of Sourpuss, who is seated and trying to read a newspaper. Annoyed at Gandy's noisy tap-dancing, he puts the paper down and yells "Quiet!"

Sourpuss is a black cat with a white face in this cartoon, quite different from his appearance in the color cartoons of this period. In those, his head and ears are a pale brown and his face a sort of beige.

Sourpuss kicks Gandy across the room toward the radio--Gandy bumps into it, knocking off the flowerpot perched on top. It falls, hitting Gandy on the head, which stuns him: his eyes cross a bit. (Kind of a natural expression for him, at that).



The music stops, and we hear an announcer's voice: "This is station W-A-K...now remember, boys and girls, all you have to do is send in 2000 box tops, and ten cents, and you will receive a magic pencil." The scene shifts to reveal the announcer in front of the microphone--a portly fellow with slicked hair and a pencil mustache. Sort of an Oliver Hardy type: he even has the same delicate gestures as Hardy--rather fey. He's holding the aforementioned pencil, which doesn't look all that "magical" at first glance. But this is a cartoon, after all...



Cut back home to Gandy, who says to the disembodied voice on the radio, "Did you say a magic pencil?"

The announcer replies "Yes, a magic pencil." (Why was that gag funnier when the folks at Warner's did it?) Gandy yells "Oh boy!", pumping his fists in the air.

We cut to a shot of the kitchen cabinet, which Gandy approaches from camera right. He pulls out a sizeable pile of cereal boxes and starts tearing the box tops off furiously, flinging them behind him. (Wait..that little cabinet can hold two thousand cereal boxes? What is it, a portal to another dimension? More importantly, where can I get one like it? The storage space in my apartment is pathetic).

The scene dissolves to show Gandy walking along carrying the enormous bundle of box tops: some in his arms, some on his head, some on his feet, and even a few on his feathered rump.



Cut to a shot of the radio--as Gandy approaches from the left, the radio starts to suck the box tops through its speaker, as if the speaker were a "mouth". Come to think of it, the radio does look vaguely human--it's one of those console types with two knobs at the top and the speaker at the center, and resembles a "face."

We cut again to a shot of the radio station and the Hardyish announcer. He's immediately splattered with Gandy's box tops, which come at him from the microphone as if they were playing cards flung in his face. They fall all around the announcer and scatter on the floor. The scene changes to a close up of the genial announcer, who says "Thank you!"

"And here is your magic pencil," he says. To a "boing" sound on the sound track, he reverses Gandy's little trick, shoving the pencil through the microphone, causing the mike stand to vibrate as the pencil starts its journey through the wire to Gandy's house. (Say, that's better service than Acme--certainly better than I got. When I was six, I pestered the mailman for six whole weeks before I got my Quisp doll.)


And did anyone notice Gandy didn't shove the dime through? It was 2000 box tops and ten cents, remember? He cheated them!

The radio, now even more human-like, "coughs" a bit before it ejects the pencil through the air into Gandy's waiting hand. Sourpuss, now curious, approaches Gandy from the left of the screen, yelling "What is that? What is that??" as he points toward the pencil.

The scene cuts to a close up of Gandy, who says, "It's a magic pencil..."

In another cut, we now see a closeup of the skeptical Sourpuss, who scoffs, "A magic pencil..." then laughs, throwing his head back. He isn't skeptical for long, though, as Gandy stands on his tiptoes and begins drawing in the air. Immediately, an egg appears, hovering in the air where Gandy drew it. Sourpuss leans underneath it to examine it more closely, one eye closed.


Naturally, it breaks open, and the yolk drops down on poor Sourpuss--who yells "Oh!" in surprise and frustration. Having done its job, it disappears as Sourpuss wipes the yolk off his face. Maybe he should have waited--then the yolk would have disappeared too. Or maybe not, since the laws of the cartoon universe seem to favor Gandy.

The scene changes to an exterior shot as Gandy emerges from the front door of the house and out into a meadow with a few trees. Gandy looks around him and laughs his trademark Ed Wynn-like silly laugh. He turns to draw something in the air again, this time a saxophone.

Sourpuss, who's been watching from the window, clearly expects something a little more useful (money, a car, a yacht, anything but a musical instrument). He yells "Oh!" at Gandy's seeming stupidity, slapping himself in the head in frustration. Jumping through the window, he lands on the ground and stands rigid, fists clenched.

We cut to a scene of Gandy dancing and playing "Swanee River" on his sax as Sourpuss sneaks behind a tree to observe. Musical notes emanate from the saxophone and begin to morph into swans as Sourpuss stares amazed.



We cut again to a scene of the now fully-formed swans as they "honk" to the rhythm of Gandy's music, hopping into the lake. Cut back to Gandy--as the last of the swans coalesces and walks off, the saxophone sprouts legs and walks off behind it, camera right. Gandy disappears from frame, camera left.

Sourpuss, meanwhile, emerges from his hiding place behind the tree and heads toward the viewer, looking stupefied in Gandy's direction. The scene changes to show Sourpuss creeping along the ground on all fours after the swans and the humanized saxophone. The sax, having noticed him, turns and emits a "honking" noise, which startles Sourpuss. He jumps in the air, eyes bugged out. Yelling "Oh!" again, he runs off to the left of the screen.


In the next scene, Sourpuss emerges from the right of the frame. Furious, he grabs a plank with which to clobber Gandy--but before it can reach Gandy's noggin, the nervous Gandy draws a spring in midair. The board hits the spring and recoils, smacking Sourpuss six or seven times in
the head. Sourpuss vibrates from the impact as we hear the ubiquitous "boing" on the sound track.

Cut to a medium shot of Sourpuss chasing Gandy--Gandy holds up both hands and skids to a halt. Brandishing his pencil, he draws a "stick figure" blonde cat girlfriend for Sourpuss, who exclaims "Aaaah!" (the voice sounds a bit different here). Elated, Sourpuss shakes Gandy's hand so violently that Gandy vibrates up and down toward the viewer. He recovers his bearings only to do a take at what he sees off screen.



Which is, of course, Sourpuss, who's dancing cheek-to-cheek with the girl cat. As the scene changes, they dance into frame from the right, while Gandy on the left begins drawing a stick figure body holding a cane--he stands on the cane for a short time so he can finish the figure, which is about twice his height.

The figure, as we soon see, is a stick figure "villain"-type cat with a handlebar mustache and a bent top hat on his head--sort of a feline Snidely Whiplash. He wears a little "butterfly" collar and spats.

Cut to a shot of Gandy running toward a wooden fence--from camera right--to watch the "fun" ensue, laughing his silly laugh at what's about to happen.

Meanwhile, the villain cat watches--twirling his mustache like a true classic bad guy--as Sourpuss and the girl cat waltz along. He takes his cane and raps Sourpuss on the head. Sourpuss goes into a fighting pose, fists raised, but the villain merely hooks him with the cane and spins poor Sourpuss through the air. As Sourpuss hits the ground, the grinning villain tips his hat to the girl cat, who looks surprised and frightened. Grabbing the girl cat's stick-figure body with his left hand, the villain starts to walk off.

"Put 'em up!!" Sourpuss yells, resuming his fighting pose. The villain ignores him and keeps walking, hitting Sourpuss in the face with his cane, then disappearing from the frame camera right. Sourpuss flips through the air and lands on his rump (punctuated by a kettle drum "thump", a slide whistle, and a bell on the sound track--Terrytoons' sound effects were somewhat old-fashioned for 1940, though they still had a rough sort of charm).

The scene jumps abruptly to the villain running along with the girl, as she pummels his head to
the sound of drums. It abruptly cuts again to show Sourpuss, still on the ground with his hand under his chin. Gandy appears from the left of the frame.



Sourpuss suddenly jumps up: "Do something! Do something!" he screams at Gandy. Gandy runs off to the right of the frame and re-emerges in the following scene, in which he's running toward an old wooden shack. He quickly takes his pencil and draws a car body and wheels on the side of the shack, which instantly transforms into a working car. Gandy opens the door and steps inside, followed closely by Sourpuss. We hear the sound of a motor as the door of the shack breaks free and the car drives off--leaving behind a door-less shack.


(Had the animators done this gag ten years earlier, the shack might have been an outhouse.)

The scene dissolves to show a sawmill (he's a villain--where else would he go?) in medium shot, with logs approaching down a wooden ramp from the top left. It dissolves again to a different angle, this time showing the logs dropping down toward a conveyor belt, something like toothpaste from a tube. We then shift to a long shot of the villain and the girl running along a series of hills and valleys--in a dead-on reworking of a Tex Avery gag, the villain's body lengthens as he runs down into the valley, shortening again as he runs up the next hill.


The scene cuts to a long-shot exterior of the sawmill--the villain approaches and heads inside, slamming the door. Cut to the interior: the villain puts the recalcitrant girl down, removes his hat, bows, and produces a pearl necklace from his hat for her. All the while he has a sinister leer on his face (come to think of it, wouldn't most guys in this situation?) The girl naturally refuses, shaking her head and striking an aloof pose, hands on hips (well, she doesn't have hips, exactly, but where they would be if she had them). The villain leans forward, snarl on his face, one eye closed.

Not one to take "no" for an answer, the villain shakes the necklace in front of her and hands it to her--she takes it and examines it under a jeweler's eyepiece. Discovering the necklace to be a cheap fake (which you can tell from her startled "take" reaction) she throws the "pearls" back in the villain's face, resuming her hands-on-hips pose. This gal is apparently as materialistic as he is...she learns quickly for someone who's been in existence for only a few minutes.


The camera pans left to reveal an enormous buzz saw--the villain points toward it as the girl screams. He doesn't take rejection lightly, this guy...but then, you could pretty much see this coming, couldn't you?

Meanwhile, our heroes--remember them?--race along in their makeshift car in long shot toward the sawmill. We see them inside only in silhouette. The car, in a dandy little bit of speed animation for this studio, bends forward from the momentum, bending back as they screech sideways to a stop.

Emerging from the car, Gandy and Sourpuss run toward the edge of a cliff--but thanks to Gandy's magic pencil, that proves no obstacle. They spy a waterfall, with the sawmill behind it, across the expanse. As Sourpuss repeats his constant cry of "Do something!", Gandy does--he draws a series of stairs to effortlessly work their way across (this--give or take a few frames--is the scene one sees in Of Mice and Magic, by the way).


Gandy looks at Sourpuss and winks, jerking his thumb toward the stairs he's drawing. He climbs up each step as he draws, with Sourpuss bringing up the rear. They jump off the last step toward the sawmill's paddle-wheel, struggling to keep their footing on the rotating wheel. (They didn't plan that very well, did they?)

Meanwhile, in the interior of the sawmill, we see that the villain has tied the girl to a log which is heading rapidly toward the menacing buzz saw (how original...). The girl stuggles and pulls at the ropes. We cut to a closeup of the villain as he twirls his mustache and laughs evilly.


On the outside, our friends are still trying to get off the paddle-wheel. They hop on to the roof (why didn't Gandy just draw more stairs, an Arabian flying carpet, anything?) and slide off the other side onto the ground. Suddenly, Sourpuss does a "take" as Gandy quickly exits toward the lower right of the frame. The villain emerges from the left brandishing a cutlass--Sourpuss grabs his stick-figure body and whirls him around, dumping him on the ground (in a near-repeat of what the villain had done to him earlier).

The villain rises and assumes an attack pose, pointing his cutlass at Sourpuss. Sourpuss grabs a forked stick and assumes a similar fighting stance.



While they're parrying and thrusting, we cut again to the interior of the sawmill, in which we see the girl still on the log, dangerously close to the buzz saw. (My, but that's a long log--or a slow saw). As the log gets consumed by the saw, the girl frantically pushes herself down toward the end of the log. We cut back to Sourpuss and the villain, fighting underneath a tree, with Sourpuss standing upside down on the underside of the branch (hey, if he can do that, why the heck would he be so fascinated with Gandy's magic pencil? It'd seem a bit mundane, would it not?)

Sourpuss continues fighting, walking up and down the side of the tree several times as he fends off the villain's attack. Just as the worst happens--the villain knocks Sourpuss' "sword" out of his hands!--Gandy emerges from camera left with a rag, "erasing" the villain as the cowering Sourpuss stands with his hands over his eyes. (Hey, Gandy, where were you a couple of minutes earlier?)

"He's gone," Gandy says. Sourpuss, who's removed his hands from his eyes to confirm that Gandy is right, says, "Quick! The 'goil'!" He runs out of frame past Gandy toward the left of the screen, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

Cut to an interior shot of the sawmill's front door. Sourpuss opens it, looking around wildly. He runs toward camera left and emerges in the next scene running toward the girl on the log. He grabs at the ropes and hastily tries to free the girl. Gandy merely appears from the bottom of the screen and pulls the lever that shuts off the saw (again, where was he a moment ago? For that matter, why didn't Sourpuss think of that?)

Sourpuss frees the girl at last, carrying her outside. As the girl looks toward Sourpuss coyly, he declares, "She's mine!!" and starts to kiss her. Gandy, that spoilsport, incredibly unravels the girl, sucking the lines back into his pencil. Outraged (and who could blame him?) Sourpuss emits his trademark "Oh!" He comes toward Gandy in a menacing pose--if looks could kill, Sourpuss would be a candidate for the gas chamber about now.


Cut to a close-up of Gandy and Sourpuss. "Gimme that pencil!" Sourpuss shouts, wrenching it from Gandy's hand. Sourpuss throws the pencil--point down--on the ground, where it sticks.

A split second later, the pencil shoots up into the air like a rocket, trailing sparks as it goes. It climbs higher and higher into the sky until it finally explodes, releasing what looks to be three large burnt-out matchsticks, which coalesce into stick-figure drawings of

Revolutionary War figures (huh?) as they hit the ground. Two figures have fifes and another a drum, and they launch into a sprightly version of "The Girl I Left Behind Me." Gandy and Sourpuss, seemingly nonplussed by this--happy, even--march right behind them. Iris out.

You read right. It ends there.

I'm shocked. I'm beyond shock. I'm perplexed, I'm puzzled, I'm flummoxed. You name it, I feel it.

This is an ending?

Let me get this straight: Gandy creates figures that come to life, leads Sourpuss on a merry chase trying to save one from another, only to casually obliterate the very one they'd went through all that trouble to save? Just to get a rise out of Sourpuss?

They destroy the one thing that could have given them everything they could imagine, yet aren't devastated when it is? Not only are they no better off than they were before, they're now confronted with the unwelcome task of eating 2000 boxes of soon-to-be stale cereal. I rather expected Sourpuss to bash Gandy one, in an Oliver Hardy-like "Look what YOU made me do!" reaction.

But even Sourpuss doesn't seem too bothered. Gandy, of course, treats this as if it were one big joke.

Is that about right? I hope not. I'm sleep-deprived after writing this all night--I'd prefer to think I'd hallucinated this part.

Did the writers want to knock off early to play golf? Somehow I can't help but think their attitude toward their job mirrored that of Gandy toward his creations. Come to think of it, that may have been the point--whereas Disney might have pondered the implications of playing God, these animators tell us, "Hey, none of this is real, folks!"

Maybe they--and their characters--simply realized that in an animated world, a magic pencil is redundant.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

(Note: This section mercilessly edited, flogged, and otherwise subdued 4/5/07, due to the author's perfectionistic nature. Carry on).

I suppose I should be more disappointed in Leonard Maltin, who must have been watching a different cartoon. His synopsis of THE MAGIC PENCIL in Of Mice and Magic reads as follows:

"Gandy acquires a pencil that makes drawings come to life. Greedy Sourpuss takes advantage of the situation, and eventually causes the destruction of the pencil..."
(pg. 139)

Sorry, my dear Mr. Maltin. Not even close. It probably should have happened that way, but it didn't.

First of all, I didn't see much evidence of Sourpuss being "greedy" or "taking advantage of the situation" at all. He might have enjoyed the girl cat Gandy created, but Gandy did it not because Sourpuss demanded he do so, but because he wanted to mess with Sourpuss' head.

Sourpuss might have been frustrated with the seemingly frivolous way Gandy was using the pencil, but who wouldn't be? All that power in his feathered little hands, the power to benefit others, not just himself. And what does he do with it? He plays the saxophone, creates swans, and enacts a stick-figure Victorian melodrama. Uh-huh. That's what I'd do, all right.

OK--to be fair, Gandy's an innocent. Not quite dumb, but naive. Still...

Further, the destruction of the pencil wasn't the result of Sourpuss' alleged greed. Gandy, remember, was hardly without guilt here. He had baited Sourpuss with the pencil, teased him with it, tormented him with it, for the entire cartoon. And wiped out his fantasy girl to boot. I'd have snatched it from him myself--then jabbed him in the eye with it.

I suppose I'm even angrier at Maltin for raising my expectations too high. His glowing review led me to expect Terrytoons' own version of MINNIE THE MOOCHER. Imagine the worlds that pencil could have created--worlds that could so easily have slipped out of the simple Gandy's control. Yet it remained surprisingly earthbound.

If you're expecting filet mignon, even the best hamburger in the world is going to be a letdown. The premise, combined with the unlimited medium of animation, where anything can happen and usually does, could have soared into the stratosphere. But like the pencil, it fizzled long before it got there.

That, sadly, is Terrytoons' fatal flaw. It's not that Terry's cartoons were bad, but that a good many of them were almost great. That's probably the greatest tragedy of all.

We see the same unfortunate pattern repeat ten years later with the next cartoon on the program, THE POWER OF THOUGHT. Better in many respects--far better--than THE MAGIC PENCIL, but not the legend it deserved to be. But more on that next time...

Tags: Terrytoons, The+Magic+Pencil, Gandy+Goose, Sourpuss, review-synopsis, Leonard+Maltin, orphan+toon

A Terrytoons Double Bill (Introduction)

Paul Terry, it could be said, was to animation what Harry Cohn was to live-action filmmaking--The King of Poverty Row.

It hadn't always been so. In the silent era, Terry's work was near the top of the ladder. Even the young Walt Disney admired the silent Terry films, and his early films were at least in part inspired by Terry's "Aesop's Fables" cartoons.

Yet by 1940, his cartoons were merely...there. Not that he wasn't innovative--he originated techniques in the silent era, such as the rotating pan shot, that would later be utilized in countless TV cartoons, in particular Hanna-Barbera's. Driven crazy by the fact that Fred and Barney pass the same building five times in the same scene? Blame Terry. However, unlike his onetime admirer Disney, Terry was only as innovative as costs would allow.

As with his counterpart Leon Schlesinger at Warner Bros, Terry went into animation because it was profitable. Unlike Leon, he at least had cartoonists' credentials, having done a newspaper comic strip in the early 1900's. But as far as he was concerned, he could have been making shoes, or nails, or doorknobs. Cartoons were product to be delivered on schedule, and deliver them he did, every two weeks, for forty years--"like a bottle of milk", to quote Leonard Maltin in his book Of Mice and Magic.

Of course, to keep to such a daunting schedule, our friend Terry shared one other trait with Leon--being notoriously cheap. In fact, his cheapness was the stuff of legend, making Schlesinger look like a drunken sailor in comparison.

Though it should probably be taken with a mineload of salt, the late Joe Barbera--very briefly an employee of Terry in the mid-'30s--loved to tell the story of his last day at the studio. Though, at first, he hadn't known it would be his last day...

(I should add here that this excerpt is courtesy of The Archive of American Television--R.)

"...Word got around to Terry that people were thinking of [going to California], and about seven of them left--I hadn't left yet, I was the last one. So I happened to go to the water cooler--this shows you the psychology--and Terry is standing by the water cooler:

(grunts): 'I'm takin' care of you!'...

What does he mean by that--'I'm taking care of you!?'...Well, the next day is payday, right?
And here comes the business guy and he gives me a check...I was getting $55 [a week]--the check was for SIXTY-five. Now, the MGM deal was for $87...but I'm thinking, 'Gee, I got a girlfriend here, I just bought a car on time, I have the routine, it's comfortable...

This is flashing through my mind when a hand came back and took the check back. The business guy says--he's got this big hairy arm--he says, "Made a mistake!" I said, 'Now what do I do??'

He comes right back and gives me the check back again...he reduced the raise from $10 to $5! I mean, is this psychology? They want to keep me there, and they give me a raise and cut in about four seconds? So I left..."

(The full interview can be seen here, on Google Video.)

Thus a simple five dollars--or lack thereof--changed the course of animation history. Though not, unfortunately, in Paul Terry's favor.

Though his cartoons' tight budgets made Terry dependable, they often showed in his studio's output.. Sloppy in-betweening, haphazard storylines, and repetition of formulas often crippled what might otherwise have been great cartoons. However, Terry would sometimes let a few gems shine through, almost despite himself. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to be discussing two of those gems, each with an almost identical premise: THE MAGIC PENCIL from 1940, and THE POWER OF THOUGHT from a decade later, starring by far Terry's most popular characters, Heckle and Jeckle. Without revealing too much, the two cartoons together could almost be called The Animator's Manifesto. Stay "tooned"...(OK, I'll probably get divine retribution for that one).

Tags: introduction, Paul+Terry, Terrytoons, The+Magic+Pencil, Joe+Barbera