Holiday time is coming and that can only mean one thing: Hallmark is once again selling new Christmas ornaments based on classic cartoon characters! This year they have a nifty one (click thumbnails above) based on the Chuck Jones cartoon Rabbit Seasoning, as well as Tom & Jerry, Hanna Barbera’s The Jetsons, and The Flintstones and several other based around Peanuts, Jonny Quest, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Space Ghost and The Simpsons. Click here for more information.

Cartoon voice actress June Foray (Witch Hazel, Granny, Rocky, Natasha) will hang out on Stu’s Show live today at 4pm Pacific Time/7pm Eastern Time. Host Stu Shostack and animation historians and writers extraordinaire Mark Evanier and Earl Kress will ask June about her incredible career - and listeners can call in too. If you miss the show, it will be repeated every day for the next week in the same time slot each day. But listen in today (It’s Stu’s 100th broadcast), call in and speak to a living legend!

This 1961 film clip of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera explaining the TV animation process is well worth a view. There’s a lot of crazy stuff that happens in the mere span of three-and-a-half minutes. First there’s the shot of layout man Alex Lovy, who takes a long drag on his cigarette before he even starts to draw, which is a unique sight for any animation documentary. That’s followed by a shot of a stereotypically obese animator who barely fits in the frame. I more or less expect animators to look like this today, but it’s something of a surprise to see such a bulky animator in 1961.

Mark Mayerson, who originally linked to this clip, also notes the video’s “casual sexism” in which “‘girls’ do ink and paint, but a ‘man’ paints the backgrounds.” Along those lines, it’s worth noting that the best “how-to” advice in the video has nothing to do with animation. Just watch as Joe Barbera puts the moves on the foxy woman interviewer at around 1:30 into the clip. Now there’s a glimpse into a long-lost era when animation execs were also smooth operators.

Your moment of Zen: Fleischer historian Leslie Cabarga put this Shockwave Flash (SWF) file together awhile ago from ALL the drawings in this scene from Sock-A-Bye Baby (most of which have been sold). Click Here!

There is a beautiful copy of George Pal’s advertising short Philips Broadast of 1938 currently available on the Europa Film Treasures site. It’s almost overwhelming to see animation that’s so fun, so colorful, so individualistic and so stylish. This was produced exactly seventy years ago, yes, SEVENTY years ago, and yet it feels as fresh and contemporary as anything being produced today. Case in point: a musician on YouTube put one of his tracks over the film. While the music isn’t timed to the animation beats, this simple experiment drives home how well the animation holds up in contemporary times.

What is most amazing is that George Pal managed to achieve these wondrous results through an archaic replacement animation technique that involved carving thousands of individuals puppets. One could well assume that today’s vastly superior and powerful technologies would be capable of producing even more spectacular imagery, and yet we end up swimming in gobs of the insipid and uninspired. At the end of the day, tools are besides the point. Animation such as Pal’s requires something more…it requires elements that have been largely absent from mainstream animation for many years: the imagination of an artist and an understanding of the possibilities of the medium.

(via Mark Mayerson)

Some of the most influential and popular TV commercials of the 1950s were the Bert and Harry Piels Beer spots created by UPA (and later on animated by Terrytoons). Much of their popularity was due to the great dialogue tracks provided by Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding (aka Bob and Ray) and the appealing animation directed by Gene Deitch. If you’ve been wondering where you could see these, Asifa-Hollywood has just posted a whole slew of the early ones on their Animation Archive blog. Go there now!

Avery’s Northwest Hounded Police, Clampett’s Book Revue or… Charles Mintz’ Svengarlic??

Blogger John Vincent makes the case for the latter, an obscure 1931 Krazy Kat cartoon, over at Uncle John’s Crazy Town. Update: Vincent uploaded the clip here.

Editor’s Note: We’d like to welcome animation director Eric Goldberg in his first post as a regular Guest Brewer.

One night as I was Googling around indifferently, I thought to myself, “Gosh! I haven’t seen those marvelous Hubley Marky Maypo spots in at least 30 years. I wonder if I can find them on the net…” (I always think to myself with three dots at the end…) About a second and a half later, my search yielded four of them, on a website linked to the company that still makes and sells Maypo after all these years. These spots made a huge impression on me when I first saw them on TV - I was four - and they still do to this day. I know Jerry posted these a couple of years ago, but they’re certainly worth revisiting - and if you’ve never seen them before, enjoy! Here is the original spot:

I’d file them under the sub-heading of “The Pleasures of the Deceptively Simple.” Yes, they’re stylized. Yes, they’re graphic. They’re also masterpieces of communication and entertaining advertising, boasting many innovations and good old-fashioned traditional know-how. First, there’s the soundtrack: John and Faith Hubley recorded semi-improvised dialogue, charming mistakes and all, with their young son Mark, making the character sound like a real kid. Wow, what a concept!

The Hubleys later used this technique in their many personal short films - with their offspring in films like Moonbird and Cockaboody, and almost as talented adults like Dudley Moore and Dizzy Gillespie in films like The Hole and The Hat. Then there’s the design and animation. UPA-style flattened (practically vertical) perspectives, graphic curlicues that somehow behave like oatmeal, and character animation - most of it by master animator Emery Hawkins - that has, despite the stylization, form, weight, timing, tons of appeal, and all the other stuff you would expect in a beautifully crafted traditional production.

Here are links to three others: here, here and here. While the last spot doesn’t quite hold up for me, compared with the other three, they’re all marvelous, and, I think, worthy of some serious scrutiny. The Hubleys were masters at making the abstract appealing and accessible, and it’s great to see these ads again as the precursors and colleagues of their innovative Storyboard short films of the late 1950s and early ’60s, especially The Tender Game and The Adventures of *, decent prints of which I hope to upload in future posts. Thanks for playing.