Animator and eagle-eyed Brew reader Celia Bullwinkel spotted this faded sidewalk stencil graffiti of Mr. Magoo planting a bomb. The piece is in Greenwich Village. Are there more of these? Does anybody the story behind this image? Click on the image below for a larger version.

Wall•E inspires a Hello Dolly revival.

Apparently Kung Fu Panda is so popular that it’s spurred a whole bunch of counterfeit merchandise, some of which are pretty funny.

I admit it. I love seeing classic animation I’ve never seen before. I particularly go nuts for original title sequences of cartoons that had been cut 50 years ago for TV broadcast. Long time readers of this site already know this.

So what is so unusual about this Popeye card above? It’s simply the rarely seen opening graphic to the first post-Fleischer Popeye cartoons. This title treatment (above) only appears at the head of two cartoons - You’re A Sap, Mr. Jap and Alona On The Sarong Seas (both 1942) - immediately after the ousting of Max and Dave Fleischer. The next release (A Hull Of A Mess) is the first to proclaim the series “A Famous Studios Production” (the new entity created to produce cartoons for Paramount release), and feature a new animated title treatment.

More about Popeye opening titles appear here, and Popeye Vol. 3 goes on sale September 30th (amazon link).

Jerry has posted a super-rare gem on YouTube: the 1965 short The Shooting of Dan McGrew directed by Ed Graham, Jr. I was so excited about seeing the film online that I asked him to let me post about it. When I first encountered this short about five years ago, the thing that popped out to me was the striking background color design of Walt Peregoy, who is most famously the color stylist of 101 Dalmatians. Unfortunately, this copy on YouTube doesn’t do justice to his color work and gives only a vague taste of what an actual print looks like.

The film was created in the spirit of earlier UPA shorts like The Unicorn in the Garden and The Tell-Tale Heart which adapted classic pieces of literature to the animation medium. In this case, the inspiration came from Robert Service’s poem of the same name.

In addition to Peregoy’s contributions, the film also has character designs by George Cannata, Jr. and background layout by UPA veteran Bob Dranko. The animation was directed by another younger design-oriented animator, George Singer, and the primary animators were Golden Age veterans Manny Gould and Amby Paliwoda. Also worth noting: the music is credited to jazz great George Shearing. This is his only animation score as far as I’m aware.

The Sixties was an interesting time for theatrical shorts in the US. As studio animation was dying out, many of the major studios offered independently-produced one-shots like this one, which was released by Universal. There are plenty of other Sixties one-shots that are currently owned by major studios and deserve to be made available to animation fans. These include two films by John and Faith Hubley that are owned by Paramount—A Windy Day and Oscar-winning Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature—as well as Ernie Pintoff’s Oscar-winning The Critic, Ken Mundie’s The Door, Format Films’ Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and Chuck Menville and Len Janson’s Stop Look and Listen and Blaze Glory.

Just out from Steve Stanchfield’s Thunderbean Animation is Cultoons 3, a new DVD set which continues his madness of releasing cartoons that only us die hards would care about. This set features all the uber-rare 1939 Gran’ Pop Monkey series as well as Boyd La Vero’s lost Marty the Monk cartoons. It also has the eccentric foreign-toon Mr. E from Tow City and the Walter Lantz wartime rarity, The Enemy Bacteria. Trust me, this is oddball material, expertly curated and lots of fun.

Stanchfield is doing all of us a big favor - rounding up the odds and ends of cartoon history, using the best prints he can find of the most obscure cartoons ever made. Another new release of note, Grotesqueries: Ghosts, Goblins & Other Magical Moving Picture Illusions is from Blue Mouse Studio (Thunderbean will be distributing it). Chris Buchman and Rex Schneider (with some help from Stanchfield) produced this fantastic DVD featuring all sorts of goodies, both animated and otherwise (and a bunch of really great bonus features. They’ve done a really beautiful job with all the graphics and design… its been in progress for over 2 years! It’s a pretty unusual and cool DVD. It also features a restoration of A Night On Bald Mountain, the 1933 Pinscreen classic by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker - the best it’s ever looked (restored and licensed from Cecile Starr). Highly recommended!

The Children’s Museum of Manhattan (212 West 83rd Street, NY, NY) has opened a new exhibit “Golden Legacy: Original Art from 65 Years of Golden Book”. It runs through August 28. Cartoonist Mark Newgarden, who told me about the show, reports: “The show features vintage original art by many animation folks on the wall—Mary Blair, JP Miller, the Provensens, etc. I did notice that all the Tenggren art were digital prints. It’s a small show but worth popping in when you’re on the Upper West Side.”

(Mary Blair artwork above scanned in by the Animation Archive)

“Kaiserwetter” is a distinctive looking video for German musician Olli Schulz directed by Benjamin Leng of HickPix. Leng tells us, “I made the video together with illustrator Niklas Hughes in a six-week period, combining hand drawn backgrounds with computer animation in After Effects.”