If you love Looney Tunes even the little details are interesting. Warner Bros. uber-art collector Eric Calande recently added this item to his collection: A 1944 paystub belonging to animator Thomas McKimson (click above to see slightly larger image). Notes Eric:

Schlesinger was paying him a whopping $90 a week. This comes to about $4700 a year when an average salary in 1944 was $20 - $25,000 $2, 600. As these were the war years, the check shows a “Victory Tax” deduction. There’s also a field for a “war bonds” deduction.

Examine the rest of Eric’s collection at WarnerArt.com.

Not sure why I’ve never linked to this before but here is an illuminating 1991 interview with legendary animation background designer Maurice Noble (What’s Opera, Doc?,Duck Amuck, The Dot and the Line). The interview was conducted by Harry McCracken and originally appeared in a print issue of Animato.

For some visual examples of Noble’s work, check out this blog post by illustrator Glen Mullaly in which he shares some composite screengrabs from the 1954 John Sutherland industrial It’s Everybody’s Business. The image at the top of this post is from that film, which can be downloaded for free at Archive.org.

And one final interesting Maurice note: in February 2008, the University Press of Mississippi will publish the first in-depth study of Noble’s work. The book, Stepping into the Picture: Cartoon Designer Maurice Noble, by Robert McKinnon, is currently available for pre-order on Amazon in hardcover or softcover. I don’t know much about the book though I believe that McKinnon was working on this with Noble while he was still alive so hopefully the book will have plenty of fresh details about Noble’s life and work.

Last month we posted about Hans Bacher’s excellent blog Animation Treasures, in which Bacher does an amazing job re-creating classic cartoon pan backgrounds based on frame grabs.

Now comes Rob Richards with animationbackgrounds.blogspot where, likewise, Rob constructs long lost BG’s, mainly Disney’s, putting a spotlight on the artists who “set the stage” for our favorite cartoon performers. Above, a Thelma Witmer painting from Lucky Number (1951). Below, a frame from Mary Poppins.

And if you are in the L.A. area, don’t miss Rob on the Mighty Wurlitzer, in his day job at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. Rob says The Jungle Book will be back on the big screen there, Sept. 7th through 23rd.

I’ve seen Pat Smith’s music video “Moving Along” before, but I never would have guessed that it had been directly influenced by the “Pink Elephants” sequence in Dumbo. Pat talks about being inspired by the Disney film and shows clips from both works in this blog post.

This cartoon series is a surprising and joyful discovery for me. From what I’ve read online though, it seems to be a well known classic among Czech viewers. Between 1965 and 1967, Czechoslovakian animator Bretislav Pojar made a series of six shorts called Hey Mister, Let’s Play. The mostly stop-motion cartoons star two bears—one smart, the other not so much. Pojar made five more episodes featuring the same bears in the early-1970s, this time calling it Who Threw That, Gentlemen?.

Below is the first short—”Potkali se u Kolina” (”How They Met At Kolin”)—which introduces the characters. The cartoon is over forty years old yet it looks as fresh and vital as any cartoon being produced today. How did they ever manage to create something with so much charm and appeal? It’s not an easy thing to accomplish, and director Pojar and designer Miroslav Stepanek make it all look so effortless. The animation of the characters is particularly fun to watch with stylized movement and graphic inventiveness abound.

For those who want to see more and can understand the following website, two dvds of these shorts can be purchased here.

Animator Mark Kausler (who has a great new blog, by the way) recently unearthed this 1955 article on Terrytoons, written for children, from Junior Scholastic magazine. This was written shortly before the studio was sold to CBS and Paul Terry himself retired. The piece explains the basics of how animated cartoons were produced in ‘55, with a great photo we hadn’t seen before of director Connie Rasinski and storyman/voice of Mighty Mouse Tom Morrison. Mr. Terry also has a great quote at the end:

“My advice to a young artist is this: Always carry a pencil and pad with you. Draw anything and everything you see that may give someone a laugh. That’s what a good animator does. He makes people laugh,”

Click on thumbnails below to see full size scans.

Yeeechhh! Take a look below.

No, it’s not Leatherface - but a vintage cloth Halloween costume of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit now selling on ebay. The fabric mask would scare the bejesus out of anyone. Talk about being “off-model”!

(Thanks, Raymond)

Just in time to clear the stench of that current Underdog movie debacle from my memory cells, come these delightful KidRobot figures that restore the fun designs of the original characters.

Click here to see close-ups of (and get ordering information for) these cool vinyl figures of Underdog, Polly, Riff Raff, and Simon Bar Sinister. Like a breath of fresh air - these characters look great in three dimensions!