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

Technical Troubles Continue: Or, Down with "Techno-rotten"

Yes, I said the next part of the review for "The Magic Pencil" would be up today. And since "today" technically still has a few hours left in it, I might still get it posted in time--but I'm not counting on it.

I discovered too late I had a little difficulty getting screen captures from DVDs--using the old "alt-Print Screen" method, all I got was a black square. Don't ask me the technical reasons why--I don't understand them. All I know is that it doesn't work.

Fortunately, I was able to fix that problem by downloading the appropriate software--you might have noticed I added screen caps to yesterday's post to liven up the text a little. At least that's taken care of. However...

...would someone please tell me whose perverted idea Technorati was? I haven't gotten that to work since I started using it--"Techno-rotten" still thinks I haven't updated my blog in eight days. In other words, the date I changed the blog URL. As should be obvious to everyone, I have posted since then. "Technorati Support" is an oxymoron--I've written them twice telling them I can't ping them. All I get are canned responses saying if I don't hear from them in a week, I should get back to them. Well, it's been more than a week, fellas...

What do you want to bet this will be the one post Technorati does find--the one trashing them? Sounds like my kind of luck.

Tags: note+to+readers, Technorati, screen+capture, technical+problems

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

Love Dat Gal!

(Edited since original posting to remove imprudent reference to Oprah Winfrey. No offense to Ms. Winfrey was intended.--R.)

She didn't have the best looking legs in the business, but a lot of people love her--including Kevin and I.

I'm referring, of course, to "Mammy Two-Shoes," the funniest character you never fully saw. And likely will never see again--unless you're willing to shell out for the TOM AND JERRY SPOTLIGHT COLLECTION (1 and 2) on DVD. Even then, you might not see her--or at least, hear her--as originally intended.

For those who don't have the cash to see her on video, despair not. There's a website out there (The Ultimate Mammy Two Shoes Page, on Tripod) devoted to all things "Mammy": pictures, sounds, a filmography of her appearances, a brief bio, and even--of all things--a "Mammy" chat room. You can find her, in all her politically-incorrect glory, here.

I apologize in advance for the annoying Tripod ads you may have to endure...

If you don't know who she is, that's understandable--one of the many animated victims of changing times, she's the "Rodney Dangerfield" of cartoon characters: cut, redubbed and (perhaps the most shameful indignity of all) re-animated out of existence.

"Mammy Two-Shoes" wasn't officially her name, of course--she had none. The name "Mammy Two-Shoes" was never uttered beyond the MGM studio walls, but was bestowed on her by the animators because that's all you saw of her--two shoes. Never in any of the cartoons in which she appeared did she show her face, though she had been seen full figure (no pun intended) in at least one--even if it was in long shot and silhouette.

She's the Hattie McDaniel-like black maid in some of the best Tom and Jerry cartoons, from the very first (PUSS GETS THE BOOT in 1940) to PUSH-BUTTON KITTY in 1952. The character for whom the sentence "Thomas, if you been in dat icebox, START PRAYIN'!" was practically a personal catchphrase. With a broom always at the ready to smack Tom, she, despite her face never being seen, had more personality than any half-dozen Disney characters. And judging from MOUSE CLEANING, a pitching arm that should have caught the attention of the Dodgers: she beans Tom with a lump of coal from a good 300 yards away!

Her relationship to Tom isn't always clear--sometimes Tom's owner, sometimes not, but always his constant nemesis. And don't think Jerry didn't take advantage of it--many of the plotlines involving Mammy concern Jerry's attempts to provoke her in order to get Tom out of the way. In fact, probably most of them, but the best were the ones that strayed from this formula. In THE LONESOME MOUSE, Jerry succeeds at arousing Mammy's ire toward Tom by making her think Tom destroyed the kitchen. Naturally Tom is booted "o-w-t out!", to borrow her unique spelling. Initially euphoric, Jerry yanks the stuffing out of Tom's bed, paints a Hitler mustache on his picture, and does the backstroke in Tom's milk dish. But the euphoria quickly fades when Jerry decides he really does miss the big lug--and schemes to get him back.

Which he does, of course, by taunting Mammy: chasing her up on a stool and hacking at it with the razor that had fallen loose from her skirts (as I said, these weren't PC cartoons). She retrieves Tom to dispatch Jerry, which he pretends to do in a particularly funny mock fight. All is well--at least until the next cartoon.

In OLD ROCKIN' CHAIR TOM, Tom and Jerry team up to combat a new cat Mammy has brought in, "Lightning," (so called because he literally morphs into a bolt of lightning when he runs) because she thinks "poor old Uncle Tom" is too old to catch mice. An accidentally-ingested iron and an impossibly powerful magnet were never so much fun.

But times were changing--starting with the end of World War II, we began to see less and less of her. By the time of THE MOUSE COMES TO DINNER in 1947, she's relegated to little more than a walk-on role, setting up the action and exiting stage left. She must have taken a Valium, because we don't see her again in the cartoon--strange considering the shambles Tom and Jerry make of the place. After 1952 she was gone, and much of the conflict--and fun--of the cartoons went with her. The white middle-class types of TOT WATCHERS were a poor replacement for the often feisty Mammy.

The cartoons transferred to TV pretty much intact in the 1950's, but in the sixties Mammy became a little bit of an embarrassment to MGM. A decision was made to edit her out of all the cartoons in which she appeared, to be replaced by a white maid (animated by Chuck Jones and voiced by June Foray). The cuts were anything but seamless--as anyone who's seen the Chuck Jones Tom and Jerrys knows, his style and Hanna-Barbera's do not mesh.

Ted Turner, who acquired the MGM film catalogue in the 80's, restored the original Mammy--with a difference. The hilarious vocal work of Lillian Randolph and the McDaniel-ish dialect were gone, replaced by a more educated, grammatically correct (and flat) black voice stripped of the nuance of the original. I can imagine no greater insult to the memory of a wonderful actress and comedienne. (Note: except what I did to her when I first posted this entry. I referred to her as Vivian Randolph, confusing her with COAL BLACK's Vivian Dandridge. Oh gods of animation, forgive me...I'll do penance by pounding myself repeatedly with an Acme mallet).

The TOM AND JERRY SPOTLIGHT COLLECTION DVDs compounded the problem at first by including some of the Turner-dubbed Mammy cartoons in its initial release, but fan complaints led to the offending disks being re-issued (though, on the commentary track for PUSS GETS THE BOOT, you can still hear the "redubbed" voice--which Earl Kress misidentifies as belonging to Randolph).

Nice to see ol' Mammy getting attention at last--now if only she could get the makeover she deserves in the form of restoration, rather than obliteration. Hey, maybe she'll make striped stockings a fashion trend.

Tags: Mammy+Two+Shoes, note+to+readers, orphan+toon, Hanna-Barbera, Lillian+Randolph

Aaaaaah, Yes! Something New Has Been Added!

Or, more to the point, "Technology Bites, Part 2..."

If you're one of the estimated six people who have seen this blog, you may have noticed that the Home For Orphan Toons got a new coat of paint and a little remodeling.

The old design was cool, but hard to read, at least to my increasingly middle-aged eyes. This redesign should make things a bit more convenient for everyone.

The sharper-eyed among you may have noticed a few minor little geegaws like the addition of a Site Meter "widget" and Technorati tags, which hopefully will make the blog known to those besides me, Kevin, Alicia, and whatever hapless doofus who inadvertently stumbles by. Sadly, it was nowhere near as simple as it should have been.

Instead of doing what I would have liked to be doing--namely, reviewing--I have spent the last week and a half following my writer friend Dorothy Thompson's advice and navigating the unfamiliar, shark-infested waters of HTML and site feeds to bring the crowds to my blog. Since my cleaning woman's 5-year-old granddaughter is more comfortable around a computer than I am, you can imagine how harrowing that was. The instructions for Site Meter referred to configuration settings that didn't exist on my blog: the "Layout" link, the "Add And Arrange Elements" page, and so on.

I looked at what was then referred to as my "Template", and saw nothing but arcane HTML code. Consequently, Site Meter didn't get added, until--

--I happened to run across a little notation in Blogger Help about having to migrate one's template as well as the blog. Seems I--heh, heh--when updating to what was then the "Beta" version, retained the old page layout and didn't know it. And it's been like that for months. Geez, Blogger, you guys could have told me that when I first switched over and saved me a nervous breakdown or two.

But, as you can see, everything's been fixed and I'm a lean, mean blogging machine. That is all. Smoke if ya got 'em.

Tags: note+to+readers, The+Home+For+Orphan+Toons, redesign

Geena Davis on Animation: No Girls Allowed?

Wow. Two posts in one day. I'm going to need to rest up after this...

As some of you more fanatical toon devotees may already know, there was a post in Jerry Beck's Cartoon Brew blog a couple of days ago about actress Geena Davis' speech to an organization known as the National Conference For Media Reform. In it she complains about what she sees as an appalling shortage of positive, well-written female characters in animated cartoons, both now and in the past. To put it mildly, her speech couldn't have set off a bigger explosion if she'd borrowed ammunition from Wile E. Coyote, judging from the comments following the post, the majority of which range from mild disagreement to towering rage.

Now, I have to say that while I agree with Ms. Davis in spirit (you can sense a "but" coming, I'm sure. Well, you're right) I respectfully suggest she study her toon history a bit. While there might not have been as many strong, dimensional female characters in animation as there ought to have been, historically the world of animated cartoons hasn't exactly been as much of a boys' club as Ms. Davis seems to think. Kevin and I discussed this in our recent correspondence, which I've included here, His comments, as always, are in italics:

Kevin says:

Rachel:

Hmmm, ya got me thinkin’.

What about Little Lulu? She seems to outwit some truly surly adult males who, rightfully, should get their comeuppance for treating others like lesser beings, merely by just being a kid. She has remained a favorite female character of mine and she *STILL* has not received her due on good quality DVD collections as yet, but I don’t want to go off on a rant as to how I feel that most or all of Famous Studios’ output just never receives recognition with full restoration. But Little Lulu obviously gets her name from not only a nickname given to silent film star, Louise Brooks, but also from an adult perspective of her as a brat who gets in the way of the adult world, she often takes the same tactic as Bugs Bunny in the sense that she’ll only get under your skin if you’ve tried to cheat or disrespect her in any way.


Hi Kevin,

"What about Little Lulu?," indeed. Good point, Kevin--I should have mentioned Lulu myself. Yes, she was a 'lulu" in more ways than one, which is what I think Marge Buell intended. You could say she was a female template for the later Dennis The Menace--not so much deliberately putting authority figures in their place like a miniature Bugs as, through her well-intentioned actions, exposing some of their bluster. (Much the same way that Bugs Bunny deflated the goonlike drill sergeant, albeit with the best of intentions, in FORWARD MARCH HARE.) Adults can be horribly condescending toward kids (I've even been guilty of this myself) and often view them as little more than objects: "children should be seen and not heard," and the like. The adults' downfall inevitably comes when the kids prove to be smarter and a little feistier than they figured.

The grouchy middle-aged man who was Little Lulu's foil had such a condescending attitude--remember when he tried to use her to get some free caddying help, figuring she could be bought off with some candy? He figured she'd stand by passively and leave him alone--but dedicated little thing that she was, she actually intended to do the job she was being "paid" for, whether she knew how to do it or not. In other words, he grossly underestimated her, and paid dearly for it. You might say he was her "Mr. Wilson", who also had some rather old-fashioned ideas about how kids should behave--and Dennis never conformed to his expectations. (Though Mr. Wilson, in truth, secretly admired Dennis for it).

Kevin says:

Comedienne Tracy Ullman ran with this premise and made her a feminist, failing to notice that Lulu’s fight for right embraced every vulnerable living thing, whether male or female. She was a kid who cared, and that is why I sometimes feel that Hollywood so often blew such a grand chance to give us a Lulu live action movie. The lyrics to the Famous Studios’ song that accompanies every LULU cartoon explains that, although some might think that she’s in the way, she’s there to prove that perhaps some adults need to be put in their place…and we ultimately love her for it!


Well, Ullman drew from the Lulu of the Dell/Gold Key comic books to a large extent. Lulu did take a strong proto-feminist stance even in the early stories, usually putting one over on the extremely sexist boys. She would devise rather clever ways of getting even with lummoxes like Tubby. [In one storyline] she, while the boys are swimming, takes their clothes, then instructs another little girl to go home and get some of her little brother's diapers and safety pins. When the panicky boys find their clothes missing and are confronted with the choice of wearing diapers home or going bare, Lulu innocently explains it was all she could find. They put on the diapers when Lulu agrees to take them home in a wagon, under a blanket, so no one would see them. Of course, Lulu sends the wagon down a hill, and the kids unintentionally draw a crowd of people. Who, of course, remove the blanket to reveal the diapered boys, much to their mortification.

The discussion about Lulu has caused me to realize that what few strong female characters there are in cartoons are, more often than not, little girls. Even the examples Geena Davis provides, such as Dora The Explorer (though I'd question that choice) and Lilo from LILO AND STITCH. I'd add to the list Lucy from "Peanuts"--she was clearly smarter than Charlie Brown and knew how to "push his buttons", so to speak, playing off his insecurities. She was the cold water of reality in contrast to Charlie Brown's hopes of eventual success, be it at kicking a football or winning a baseball game. From the same strip is, of course, Peppermint Patty (though, being a tomboy, she's probably not the best example).

Even Davis' other cited example, Kim Possible, is a teenager.

Or how about the Baby Snooks quail in the Warner Bros. cartoon QUENTIN QUAIL? Here's another case of a girl character who, like Lulu, makes blustery adults look stupid--in this case her father.

Honey, in both her incarnations, is pretty much a given. Even though in her earliest form she was presumably an adult character, she was nonetheless very little girl-like (with the exception of the oft-mentioned BOSKO IN PERSON).

I could, I suppose, even add my own aborted cartoon character ("Aimee") to the list, as she's a sarcastic, feisty little-girl character in the Lucy mold.

Why is this, I wonder? Is it more acceptable for little girls to have some guts, as they're young and as yet, sexless (and therefore unthreatening)? An aggressive female character who can vanquish opponents with the finesse of a Bugs Bunny might have been a little too frightening for the male animators of the Golden Age to contemplate. (The sexual implications of such a character aside).

The few dimensional adult female characters one can think of were the other extreme, little old ladies like Granny and Witch Hazel (also, it's presumed, sexless and unthreatening). Olive Oyl was a young adult female and certainly sexual (look at the way she drooled over Bluto!) but the sexuality is negated by her appearance.

We may have just hit on the reason here--give a young attractive adult female character power and you get a Betty Boop, or so the male animators think. Even today that makes the "boys' club" nervous. They can't make a female character funny without stripping her of all the sexual "baggage."

Though, to be fair, what template did they have to draw from? The humor in cartoons of the 1930s and '40s was drawn largely from two sources--vaudeville and comic strips. Besides Gracie Allen and maybe Fannie Brice, there weren't any prototypes from the stage on which to build funny, appealing, dimensional woman characters.

In the comics they were legion--Tillie The Toiler, Fritzi Ritz, Blondie--but generally didn't translate well to animation. So that left very little.

And does Ms. Davis not regard perhaps a slightly modernized version of Lulu, with a consciousness to boot, young Lisa Simpson? Here’s a little girl who could make you weep as we sometimes watched the unfeeling world through her eyes and she ultimately had to compromise and lower her standards. You and I, personally, know that feeling well!!

You're really on the ball this morning--I should have mentioned Lisa Simpson as well. She's even taken over the spotlight from her brother Bart to a large extent, which I suppose could be considered poetic justice of a sort. But again, she's a little-girl character, and therefore safe.

Yeah, sometimes I do bemoan the fact that more wasn’t done with characters like Honey. Even when she was a little fully realized black stereotype, inspiration could have been drawn from jazz singers and performers and our little Honey could have produced for her animators some terrific production numbers that would have shown her to be a viable character into the 1940’s. I was disappointed that harmon didn’t retain her right up into the end of the series, but you’re talking, as you stated, about a good ol’ boy regime that had plagued cartoons and, perhaps, film throughout that period. Yet, understand that this did not stop females from coming to the forefront, even if they had to compromise certain standards that they would have rather put in the forefront of their careers, but they beat a system that would have often kept them out if they didn’t show themselves to be as strong.


Imagine the possibilities--say Vivian Dandridge doing a 1940's Honey. It's an intriguing prospect, with her as a little jazz/blues singer in the way Bosko imagined himself to be a little Cab Calloway in his final three cartoons. Even though women are coming to the forefront now, one can't help but be a little mournful of what might have been.

So rather than dismiss Gena Davis’s comments as misrepresentations, I’d rather challenge her viewpoint with any great toon festival showing the female characters in clear focus, even if they are vamping it up.


As for LOONEY TOONS, let’s not forget a cartoon called “WILD WIFE”. It’s title might seem to suggest that its lead character with her rants of having such a busy day and her husband not believing that she’s even intelligent enough to have such trials and tribulations is just whining once again, but listen to that husband and watch these kids as she tries to get them all out to where they are going so she can have some down time. And, even then, she meets the usual daily obstacles. I’d have ended the husband’s rant in the same fashion as she did since that seemed like the only way to get through to him!!


Yes, she was the rare funny adult female character, if ruined a bit by the usual stereotypes of the time (for example: she can't parallel park, she shops so much she has to open up a tiny "window" in the mile-high stack of packages she's carrying to see in front of her, the rolling-pin bit at the end) but it was the first Warner Bros. cartoon I could think of that was sympathetic to the plight of the housewife. It was also the only one I can think of that put a female character in slapstick situations (as when she runs out to feed the meter at the beauty parlor, curlers still in her hair and a mudpack on her face. She almost scares some poor passer-by to death).

An "all-girl" collection of reviews in the coming week might be appropos for the blog, if I can find the time, though as usual I make no guarantees.

To sum up, Kevin, I must congratulate you on your comment on Cartoon Brew, which made some points I failed to address, and made my post seem silly in comparison. Your ability to write amazes me at times.

Rachel

To this I would only add the following--what Davis is doing is admirable. I do caution her not to be overly enthusiastic, however--in her zeal she may pressure animation studios to include female characters just for the sake of including them, and what good is that? Is a "token girl" what she wants? Should she work with studios to make the sort of cartoons her daughter would want to see, she ought to ask herself one question, "Will this be entertaining, both for me and for her?" That's the only thing that truly matters.

Tags: classic+animation, Geena+Davis, girls

It's Alive! It's Alive!

Yes, I know--I've been gone a long time.

Much of the time has been spent wondering what I should do with this blog. I considered even abandoning it completely, and probably would have were it not for one thing.

It's attracting the notice of writers such as Dorothy Thompson, who recently showcased this blog in her ongoing feature How To Pump Up Your Blog To Sell More Books. Ms. Thompson made very valuable suggestions, such as adding a site meter to track visits. However, as that requires a monthly fee, I'm going to have to think long and hard before I commit myself to any expenses. I'm already in up to my neck with Netflix as it is.

With this newfound attention, I wondered if I should make this blog more "writerly", writing more standard (that is, brief) animation reviews, or should I continue my commitment to Kevin and provide every single visual detail for his enjoyment? The reviews as they stand now are an editor's nightmare, taking up the equivalent of fifteen single-spaced typed pages. It doesn't exactly show me at my best as a writer, but...

After a good deal of thought, I've decided friendship should win out, and the reviews, for now, will be written as they've always been.

There have been a lot of new developments on the toon front, at least for me. For one, I finally broke down and bought one of Jerry Beck's excellent series of DVDs containing obscure animation. The one I chose, a Terrytoons disk covering the 1940-41 release season, contains a cartoon that, while flawed as most Terrytoons are, merits attention: a Gandy Goose cartoon called THE MAGIC PENCIL. Guess what's going to be the first review for the revived blog?

Tags: note+to+readers, Kevin+Wollenweber, Dorothy+Thompson