Check out this informative post by John McElwee on his Greenbriar Pictures Shows blog. McElwee describes what a 1930s Saturday matinee Popeye Club meeting was like, recalling the memories of a local theatre manager and illustrating the post with vintage Popeye short subject trade ads. Ahh, those were the days!

Several years ago, when Playhouse Pictures closed its Hollywood office, cartoonist Mike Kazaleh purchased some old files being sold off in their garage sale. In one of the folders Mike found this intriguing bit of correspondence (click on pages below) between UPA Vice President and Production Manager Adrian Woolery and Spyros Skouras, President of 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation.

In this initial letter from November 7th, 1952, Woolery, who has just established his offshoot animation studio Playhouse Pictures, complains to Skouras about the quality of Fox’s Terrytoons (in particular, a Heckle & Jeckle short named House Busters):

“It was not a good picture. The story was completely lacking in charm and imagination. There was not a new or interesting idea in the entire reel. The characters and backgrounds were poorly designed and drawn. The story and gags were not funny or even amusing. I had a feeling this same picture had been done dozens of times in the last score of years and in fact was done much better twenty years ago.”

After hurling a few more insults at the Terrytoon, Woolery concludes:

“It is my sincere belief that we in the animation business have at our command the finest medium of expression. It must be exploited by capable people who have the courage and ability to recognize its unlimited potential. Fortunately, good pictures do not cost any more than bad ones.”

Was Woolery trying to convince Skouras to drop Terrytoons and commision Playhouse to provide modern cartoon shorts, as UPA did for Columbia? Skouras replied on January 23rd, 1953 (click letters at left), that he was quite pleased with the Terrytoons as is:

“…I cannot agree with the conclusion you arrived at after seeing the particular Terrytoon called House Wreckers (sic). As a matter of fact, Terrytoons Cartoons are immensely popular with audiences everywhere and are played in thousands of theatres. Audiences found them attractive enough to make our 1952 reciepts from Terrytoon releases to be most gratifying. You may be sure we are always endevoring to make this product better and, in 1953 we will do our utmost to improve all of our short subjects.”

And in fact, shortly thereafter, Fox forced Terry to begin producing his cartoons in CinemaScope. In 1955, perhaps taking Woolery’s suggestion to heart, Terrytoons installed UPA director Gene Deitch to overhaul the theatrical cartoons and bring them up to date with modern graphics.

Below is the first minute and a half of the cartoon that set Woolery off, House Busters, which features animation by Jim Tyer (the scenes of the convict escaping prison) and a delightful song written by Philip Schieb.

Disney historian and author Jim Fanning has written a fine appreciation of the little-seen Ward Kimball featurette Dad, Can I Borrow the Car? (1970). I also wrote some thoughts about this film a few years back. Best of all, somebody has posted the film onto YouTube and it can be seen below in three parts (though it should be noted that there is also a later TV version that is twice the length). And if you’re a fan of Kimball, stay tuned to the Brew for an upcoming post about an even rarer project he directed at Disney.

The animation history round-ups have become one of my favorite types of posts to do on Cartoon Brew. It is always eye-opening to see the wealth of classic material that appears on-line on a regular basis. The cartoon history being posted online is about as grassroots as an effort gets, lots of various people (animation historians, the families of artists, and students and fans of the art form) coming together to share things from their collections without any specific agenda. There’s also no financial incentive here, only the desire to help one another and the art form grow and prosper. It will be exciting to see how the new generation of artists learns from this material and pushes the art form even further forward.

• Powerful Dumbo storyboards by Bill Peet are matched only by powerful Dumbo animation by Bill Tytla.

• Rare drawings by Playboy cartoonist (and former Disney story artist) Eldon Dedini (via Flog!)

• Animation director Ward Jenkins examines the Tex Avery-Tom Oreb classic Symphony in Slang (1951).

• A Virgil Ross-animated pencil test of Bugs Bunny from A Hare Grows in Manhattan.

• The wonderful commercial animation of animator Jack Schnerk can be seen in the reel below as well as the second and third reels on YouTube. Director Michael Sporn offers some memories of working with Schnerk on his blog.

• “It is a well-known fact at Disney’s that a man has to love an animal thoroughly before he can draw it well,” says this 1942 article from Nature magazine about the making of Bambi.

• Animation director Bob Jaques offers an appreciation of Jim Tyer’s animation in the 1946 Popeye cartoon The Island Fling.

Previously on Cartoon Brew:
Animation History Round-Up #1
Animation History Round-Up #2
Animation History Round-Up #3
Animation History Round-Up #4

Below is an early-1940s article from a magazine called Your Charm, a young woman’s magazine alone the lines of Mademoiselle. Forgive the quality of the quick-and-dirty digital photo and the fact that the piece is incomplete. But I couldn’t resist documenting this sentence in the article: “By this same token you probably find more crabbing there than in any other business in town. It runs the gamut of from why is Fred the gardener planting all that alfalfa to what does Walt want to make that story for!” I guess some things in animation never change. This caption on the second page is also a classic: “Frequent sketching trips to the nearby zoos and the surrounding countryside are conducive to romance for young Disney artists.”

click for large view

Joshua Glenn of the Boston Globe has created an audio slideshow presentation that points out the influence of cartoonist Winsor McCay on cinema. Films like King Kong, Dumbo, and Mary Poppins are used as examples.

(via BB)

Here’s the opening credits to a long gone (but not forgotten) TV series, My World And Welcome To It (1969):

What an odd show this was. It combined the writings and drawings of James Thurber with the conventions of a late 1960s sitcom. It also featured regular doses of animation (usually adapting Thurbers black & white ink line drawings) by DePatie-Freleng. I recall there was a controversy over using a laugh track on this show. The series was a bit laid back in some respects, and Thurber’s witty parables were possibly over the heads of much of its viewing audience. Despite winning two Emmys (Best Comedy Show and Leading Actor, William Windom) it was cancelled after one season. A DVD release of the complete series would be quite enlightening. I’d love to see it again.

In the meantime, here’s one of the show’s animation segments on You Tube.

A few years back, when MTV wanted to revive the Terrytoons characters, they commissioned an animation test in CG (of course, what else could a revival be done in?). Below is the test featuring Hashimoto, Sidney the Elephant and The Astronut. It’s about as good as one would expect it to be.

(via Animation ID)