It was just a couple weeks ago that I was lamenting on the Cartoon Modern blog the unavailability of the UPA commercials. Today I have some good news to report. I just got word that animation legend Tissa David has contributed her collection of rare UPA-NY TV commercials and original artwork to the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Study Center. David, age 86 and still animating, donated a dozen pristine 16mm and two 35 mm b&w films of TV commercials for products such as Piels Beer, Cheer, Cannon, and Windex.

Also in the donation are original animation production folders for UPA TV commercials (Nescafe, Chrysler, The Danny Thomas Show, Ford Edsel, Grape Nuts and Coca Cola, among others) containing designs, character models, layouts, exposure sheets and hundreds of sequential animation drawings (in rough and cleaned-up versions). The drawings are by both by Grim Natwick, and Tissa David, who was Natwick’s chief assistant for many years. A huge thanks to John Canemaker for orchestrating this donation and helping Ms. David prepare the material for transfer to the museum.

I was speaking to June Foray today and was surprised to find out she isn’t in the cast of the currently-in-production CG Horton Hears A Who.

Foray, of course, was cast in the original 1970 Chuck Jones TV special playing Cindy Lou Who and Jane Kangaroo. IMDB lists Carol Burnett as voicing the role of Jane Kangaroo in the current production. Gosh, I know it’s way too late to change anyone’s mind at Blue Sky or Fox, but couldn’t Foray - a living legend and the only surviving member of the original cast - at least play a bit part in the new film?

Well, there goes Popeye the Sailor Man, It’s A Hap-Hap Happy Day and Casper The Friendly Ghost. Not the characters (they were sold off years ago), but the theme songs and music from 80 years of Paramount Pictures. Viacom announced today the sale of Famous Music to Sony/ATV.

“This is a milestone event for Sony/ATV Music Publishing,” said Michael Jackson (yes, that Michael Jackson. He co owns Sony/ATV). In addition to all the Fleischer and Famous Studios cartoon themes (which include Superman, Little Audrey and Herman and Katnip’s Skiddle Diddle Dee) the Famous Music catalogue includes 125,000 songs, including themes from The Brady Bunch and Star Trek, songs from Broadway shows such as A Chorus Line and The Producers, and hundreds of pop tunes and Academy Award winning soundtracks.

The Famous brand name dates back 1912 when Paramount Pictures founder Adolf Zukor created Famous Players. In 1942 when the studio removed the Fleischer brothers and established their own animation studio, they named it Famous Studios, a sister company to Famous Music. All that tradition comes to an end today.

Tony Mines of Spite Your Face Productions sent me a note about an early-1960s British animated series, The Pingwings, which had been considered lost for the last forty years. The prints were recently found again and a small label in the UK has released the entire series onto dvd. I asked Tony if he could shed a bit more light on this stop-mo series. Here’s what he says:

Pingwings is, so far as I can gather, the very first production by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin’s Small Films. The pair would go on to create pre-school classics like The Clangers, Bagpuss and Noggin the Nog that generations of British children and parents have grown up with. I mention it because while the latter are household names over here, Pingwings is almost completely unknown. Which is criminal, because it’s amazing.

Demonstrating a gleeful disregard for the shortcomings of filming stop-motion out of doors, the show concerns the adventures of a family of wooly penguins that live in a farmyard. Even the most famous of Small Films work is notoriously low-tech, but here you can see how they started out, working literally out of a barn.

Shown only once in the UK, the series was thought lost until recently, and has now been released on DVD, under a small label here. You don’t even seem to be able to get it on Amazon. The DVD contains all three series of 6×5(ish) minutes episodes.

One of the greatest thing about it is to watch how everyone involved develops over the three series. Not only do the Pingwings themselves grow a little older as the show progresses, but story elements and new characters come into play that you can see were developed and reused in later series, notably Bagpuss and The Clangers. In that sense, it forms the blue print for a whole generation of programming.

Here’s a clip from the first episode:

One of my guilty pleasures, when watching Paramount cartoons from the mid-1930s through the late 1940s, is admiring the incredible “Fleischer lettering” in the main titles (and occasionally in the body of the cartoon itself). I’ve never been able to identify the mystery studio calligrapher, but this person’s unique work is as much a part of the studio’s style as the animation, voices and music. This lettering style first shows up right before the Fleischer studio moves to Miami and is prevalent throughout the 1940s Famous Studios period (you can view some of this work on my Paramount Original Titles page). This individual also did the Famous Studios logo, Fleischer/Famous letterheads and in-house publications.

Graphic designer Mark Simonson has just created two new fonts based on “Fleischer lettering” and they look terrific. Coincidentally, Mark has also been working on a font resembling to my second favorite classic movie lettering: Columbia Pictures titles (most recognizable from Three Stooges shorts, Sam Katzman serials and just about everything Columbia released from the late thirties through the mid 1950s). But I digress. I’ll be ordering his Fleischer styled Snicker and Kinescope later this week.

(click for large version)

Shane Glines of the indispensable Cartoon Retro has sent over a fascinating 1935 article, titled “Hollywood’s Men of Action,” from Everyweek Magazine, a Sunday newspaper supplement. The Depression-era piece plays up the high salaries possible by working in animation.

There’s some interesting things about the article. For one, it has the only photo I’ve ever seen of Lantz animator LaVerne Harding. (I think the male animator at top is Norm Ferguson; does anybody know for sure.) Also curious, it mentions Flintstones designer Ed Benedict as one of the top Lantz animators. This was still relatively early in his career so it’s interesting that he got top billing over more experienced Lantz animators like Bill Nolan.

Of particular note is this section where Walt Disney explains why women don’t make good animators:

Ordinarily Disney keeps from 30 to 40 men in his apprentice room. The apprenticeship lasts from six months to a year.

As a rule this class is composed entirely of young men. Seldom is a girl found among them. For some inexplainable reason, women don’t make good animators. At the present time there is only one in the entire business—Verne Harding who works on Oswald at Universal.

“I don’t know why girls should be poor animators but they are,” Disney declares. “Very frequently they are better artists than men but for some reason they lack the knack of getting smooth action into their drawings.”

This quote from Walt is also amusing:

“I’ve often been told how lucky I am not to have any stars to go temperamental on me,” Disney remarks. “It’s true I never have any trouble with Mickey, the three pigs or any of my characters. But don’t ever think animators can’t be temperamental. Say, they can be just as bad as any star you ever saw.

“Occasionally one will have an off day on which he can’t draw anything worth while. Then he has to be pampered and pulled out of his slump with all the diplomacy that would be used on a star.”

If there’s one question I’ve received more frequently than any other since the release of Cartoon Modern, it’s “Where can I see the UPA films?” There’s a lot of Golden Age animation being released onto dvd this year (Droopy, Popeye, Lantz cartoons, Tom and Jerry, etc.) but the catalog of classic cartoons produced by United Productions of America (UPA) during the 1950s remains completely off the radar. The studio produced just over ninety shorts and these films have not enjoyed a major release since a series of VHS tapes released the late-’80s.

It’s depressing that the only suggestion I can offer to folks looking for these films is to search for twenty-year-old out of print VHS tapes. I think it’s about time that Columbia pulled together a decent box set of all of the studio’s shorts, a package that gives us the classic characters (Gerald McBoing Boing, Mister Magoo, the Fox and Crow) along with the studio’s groundbreaking one-shot shorts (The Unicorn in the Garden, The Tell-Tale Heart, Rooty Toot Toot, The Jaywalker and Madeline). Until then, you can find some of the UPA shorts on video sharing sites. I’ve included links to all the ones I could find below, though unfortunately, if there’s one animation studio whose work doesn’t deserve to be seen in this crummy compressed Flash format, it’s the graphically intensive filmmaking of UPA.

Robin Hoodlum (1948)
The Magic Fluke (1949)
Gerald McBoing Boing (1951)
Rooty Toot Toot (1952)
The Tell-Tale Heart (1953)
Christopher Crumpet (1953)
The Unicorn in the Garden (1953)
Ballet-Oop (1954)
The Rise of Duton Lang (1955)

Now Hear This is without doubt one of the weirder (and more difficult to find) WB shorts that Chuck Jones ever made, but it’s a nice reminder that even after twenty-five years of directing shorts, Jones was still open to experimentation and able to have fun with his chosen medium of expression. Credits include co-direction by Maurice Noble, sound effects by Treg Brown, and a co-writing credit between Jones and John Dunn, who I’m sure you’re all familiar with from the recent Animation Blast #9.

(via Mark Mayerson)