Long time readers of my Cartoon Research website know that I’m absolutely fanatic over original titles. In fact I have a whole section of my website devoted to it.When I discovered how much better my favorite classic cartoons played in their original form, before being butched by TV syndicators (and in many cases, the studios themselves), it was a revelation. Thus I began a campaign to locate and restore the original openings and closes - and raise people’s consciousness about it. Some of the results of this work were seen on Cartoon Network’s late POPEYE SHOW and on dvds like SOMEWHERE IN DREAMLAND.Fellow film collector Jim Tucker just came into some films, saved for over 60 years, that were part of a World War II film collection. In this collection was a 1942 Terrytoon with it’s original titles intact. It struck me immediately that I’d never seen the black & white titles to Terrytoons produced during this era - all the prints I’ve ever seen have replaced TV titles. Thanks to Jim, I’ve added these frame grabs to my Terrytoon Original Titles page - and this gives me a good excuse to remind you I have several of these pages, here, where you can see what we’ve been missing all these years.

Indie filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt will participate in his only live chat of 2004 this evening at 6pm (Pacific time). He’ll talk about his ambitious new independent short as well as the second edition of THE ANIMATION SHOW. Participate at Bitterfilms.com.
(thanks to kitty-b for the tip)

Just noticed that THE ART OF THE INCREDIBLES, which could be alternately titled “The Genius of Teddy Newton,” is now shipping at Amazon. I saw an advance copy a few months back and can definitely recommend this as a must-have book. Man, November 5 can’t come soon enough.

I’m excited about WALT’S PEOPLE - TALKING DISNEY WITH THE ARTISTS WHO KNEW HIM, a new book project being edited by Didier Ghez. Each book will collect rare unpublished interviews with Disney animation artists. With most of the Golden Age Mouse employees now gone, these raw interviews should offer a wealth of new, previously unavailable, information to students of Disney animation and allow everybody to hear these artists in their own voices. From the press release:

Contributors to the series include noted Disney historians Robin Allan, Paul F. Anderson, Michael Barrier, J.B. Kaufman, Jim Korkis, Mike Lyons, John Province, Thorkil Rasmussen, Arn Saba and Klaus Strzyz. These key Disney experts, by accepting to contribute to the project, are giving readers access to the source materials they used for their works. Many of these materials are being published for the first time in their entirety. We are also uncovering new or quasi-unknown material virtually every day: a forgotten interview with Woolie Reitherman, lost tapes of talks with Paul Murry, rare conversations with Al Hubbard, Floyd Gottfredson and many others that will be released in the upcoming volumes of the series. Each book will have as broad a focus as possible, discussing Disney animation, Disney theme parks and Disney comic-book history with interviews of the best artists in each of those fields, be they from the early ’20s or from the early 21st century.

The first volume is being released in early November. This initial offering will include interviews with Rudy Ising, Dave Hand, Bill Tytla, Ken Anderson, Jack Hannah, John Hench, Marc Davis, Milt Kahl, Harper Goff and Joyce Carlson. The book will be available on Xlibris, Amazon and other on-line retailers. This is an independently published book so hopefully Disney aficionados will get behind this project so we’ll see subsequent volumes in the series.

Monday, July 19, 2004
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I was enjoying a pleasant morning walk around the pond, minding my own business, when some noisy, nasty bird tried to shit on me. It hovered over my head, shrieking, while it sprayed out a stream of excreta. I jumped out of the way, and was struck by only the tiny spot shown below on my shoulder. In no way do I blame the fine people of Iceland for the inhospitable attitude of their wildlife.

After rinsing my shirt off I go to the office, where I acquaint the lovely Script Supervisor, Thora Clausen, with my hideous hillbilly alter ego Clem. Clem appears when I put a pair of dentures in my mouth that disfigure my face and shut off my brain I’m sure he’ll cause an international incident while I’m in Iceland.

I can hardly wait.

Ken Pontac,
Breathing through my mouth,
Iceland

Check out these Quicktime trailers for Blue Sky’s ROBOTS and Nickelodeon’s THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE.

One of my favorite comedians Rodney Dangerfield passed away today.I am a big fan of his work in several comedies, particularly THE PROJECTIONIST (1971) in which he played an unscrupulous movie theatre manager who would turn down the air conditioning and put extra salt in the popcorn just to sell a few more ice cold Cokes.Of course, the reason we mention him here is his starring role as ROVER DANGERFIELD (1991), a nice little animated feature from Hyperion Studios. It was originally planned to be an R-rated cartoon with lots of Las Vegas humor, but the producers and studio got cold feet and it became another bland G-rated family film. Of course, Rodney was one of its producers, it’s screenwriter and he co-wrote several songs in it. It’s worth a look, especially if your a fan of Rodney’s. The film, and Rodney, had my respect.

In his latest article for AWN, The Animation Pimp explores the assholeishness of Donald Duck and arrives at the tragic, all too human, core of the Disney duck’s personality.