That was pretty great….

He pitched the alligator into the bin. I even liked some of the designs quite a bit.

Oh, Jerry, keep it up! These things are wonderful! Well, actually, they’re sorta like anti-wonderful. If you could turn ‘funny’ inside out you’d probably end up with a late fifties/early sixties Modern Madcap. But I love ‘em! I can remember seeing “Finnegan’s Flea” and “Grateful Gus” at the drive-in as a kid. Even a seven year old could dope out “this isn’t funny, but it’s unfunny in a FASCINATING way!”

Jerry, oh, Jerry, thank you so, SO much!

I can’t describe this cartoon. So dark, so cynical, so cruel, so morbid, so scathing, yet so, so fascinating, and so, so funny! And brilliant! I LOVED IT! It was definitely up there with “Chew Chew Baby” in terms of WTF-ness and all of the same qualities of that cartoon that makes it unsuitable for the public eye, particularly for the kiddies. Irv Spector had a pretty frigged-up sense of humor (but that certainly isn’t a bad thing!).

If only the rest of Famous’ output could have been this funny…

Bravo, Mr. Spector.

The 1960-63 one shots done by Spector and/or Lawrence still maintain a pretty decent level of humor, because they’re not trying to dumb down the stories for the kiddos, the way the other Paramount cartoons during the period did. By this time, there really wasn’t enough animation budget left to actually put over any slapstick comedy, even in it’s weakest form, like some of Famous’ continuing series in the 50s, so the Paramount shorts totally lived and died on their stories, and the ones Spector and Larwence were doing at least had different (and usually more cynical) plots than the stuff Carl Myer, Jack Mercer and the others were turning out.

Quite disturbing. I love it. Keep going….

It’s as if Alfred Hitchcock were a Famous gagman for one week. And it certainly proves, as the industry tends to never remember, that comedy comes in infinite variations and that slapstick need not be the sole alternative to action adventure. Theatrical cartoons were like bar cars on passenger trains in the 1960s: they’d serve anything to anyone, regardless of age, ’cause they needed the loot.

Well THAT was a dark cartoon.

I love it!

Can someone help me identify a couple of Modern Madcaps I haven’t seen in about 30 years? (They used to run these all the time on WPIX in NYC when I was growing up.)

One cartoon opens with a bartender plying a customer in a state of permanent shock with pretzels and beer. The bartender then tells his sad story via flashback: a variation on ONE FROGGY EVENING – not nearly as funny or well-designed, of course – involving a singing (I think) flea, or a fly or something.

The other cartoon, a much funnier one, involves a suburban couple waging an escalating fight with City Hall over a pothole that causes passing sanitation trucks to empty garbage into their home. (I remember a funny running gag involving the word “Disgusting!”)

In the meantime, for anyone who has never seen it, here’s Paramount’s CHEW CHEW BABY:

http://saturdaymorn.blogspot.com/2008/04/chew-chew-baby-1958.html

Mike, the other cartoon you’re thinking of is “La Petite Parade” – it’s set in Paris, and that’s the one with the daily parade past the house, and the “department sanitaire” is always the last in line, dumping garbage in front of the hapless couple’s house.

Famous was onto something here. If the time had been right, who knows what might have happened?

Yep, very easy to see how the Ted Bundy/Gary Ridegway attitude toward them Evil Woman Objects was bolstered by media like this. There were no female voices to counter the he-male chorus.

This is a more mature version of the dark stories that have often permeated Famous’s cartoons. That studio specialized in doing dark, henpecked husband stories. Remember it’s Henry the Henpecked Rooster series from the 1940′s.? The Eddie Lawrence narration and Irv Spencer’s minimalist drawings give the film its modern look. Other than that, it’s a continuation of the dark, violent, sometimes disturbing films Famous had been doing. Even Winston Sharples’ music is just as moody and dirgelike as the scores he produced for the Famous product released during the late ’40 and throughout the ’50s. Famous’ product really got more modern when Howard Post took over the studio.

My post last night apparently didn’t take so here’s a revised version — If you go over to Paul Spector’s blog, you’ll see his post on this cartoon, and his dad’s notations describe it as a “Hicthcockian(sic) type story.” One of the biggest shows on network TV in the late 50s and early 60s was “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and the cartoon was released a year after Paramount released “Psycho”. And at the same time “The Plot Sickens” came out, “The Flintstones” did their own Hitchcock parody. Only in this one, at the end we actually do have a dead wife.

Paramount also did a number of “Stupid husband makes long-suffering wife’s life miserable” cartoons during the same time period, like “Talking Horse Sense” and “TV Fuddlehead”, which also were part of the effort to come up with some one-shot stories that were more mature in story content than the continuing series. So if you’re going to go after this cartoon for misogyny, you might as well start yanking the Hitchcock DVDs of the same time period off the shelves.

[...you might as well start yanking the Hitchcock DVDs of the same time period off the shelves.]

Why stop there? Not that that would appease the Thought Police crowd, anyway.

Speaking of Eddie Lawrence, his 90th birthday occurred this very week (March 2). “The Old Philosopher” has made it to the adjective. Hope he’s doing well!

Wikipedia’s entry for Lawrence includes a paragraph about his tenure at Famous.

Blecch. This trope had been beaten into the ground by “Maggie and Jiggs” and “Andy Capp” for YEARS before “Famous Studios” discovered the formula. “Famous” specialized in taking tired, worn-out cliches and making them meaner and uglier. Compare and contrast “Tom and Jerry” with “Herman and Katnip.” Utterly wretched. There is a reason these cheap, mean-spirited piles of s**t are largely forgotten.

Don’t give me this “Mid-century Modern artsy-fartsy ‘they are historically important’ design” nonsense.

Hmmm… So far the same poster has introduced serial killers, misogyny and the “natural order” of slavery into a discussion of a 50 year-old cartoon produced for general audiences. Then, after lecturing the rest of us about “flying off the rails” in Internet discussions, advises us to “get some guts, man”.

I’ve heard of medicine-coating the sugar – but seriously, why bother posting raving nonsense? There are plenty of conspiracy theory chatboards for the tinfoil hat set.

See, here’s some more of that wonderful instant-flying-off-the-rails so common with internet discussions. Lamenting the ugly portrait of women in a cartoon is immediately conflated with censoring Hitchcock DVDs. Nobody’s talking about banning anything. But hey, Alfred Hatchplot is notorious for his difficulties with the females of the species.

No flying off the rails — Merely noting that you’re attempting to either see the cartoon in a vacuum without any context of what the story line was targeting in the culture of the middle part of the 20th Century; or you’re falling into the time-honored bromide of “cartoons are for children” and are saying Paramount shouldn’t have even broached the subject in a theatrical short because — while murdering your wife is suitable for a Hitchcock film, it’s not a proper subject for a six-minute cartoon.

The women in Spector’s matchmaker trilogy (“L’amour the Merrier”, “La Petite Parade”, “Galaxcia”) that came out in the four years before “The Plot Sickens” are equally as unappealing as the wife is here, and I suppose if you wanted to do some sort of gender-based deconstruction of the shorts you could say they represented a society that easily adapted and countenance the stereotyping of ugly women as shrewish middle-aged spinsters. Which might make you feel morally superior to the writers and other staff members at Paramount of half a century ago. Or you could just sit back and enjoy the cartoons on their own terms without trying to inject political analysis based on society as it is in 2009 (and I can find a lot of pop culture today that’s far more misogynistic than anything in this short).

Whenever I read the word “misogyny” I have the sick feeling that all the fun and life is about to be sapped out of something innocent, harmless, and joyful. “Out of the pool, everybody! He said ‘misogyny’!”

National Lampoon used to have a feature called “Professor Kenilworth Explains the Joke”, in which a joke was told, and then an academic explained why it wasn’t funny. “Besides the fact that dogs cannot speak and are not generally allowed in bars…”

These days no blog is complete without Professor Kenilworth.

I’ll still take Virgil Partch –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_Franklin_Partch

who worked the same sort of territory and was more subversive, surreal and true to the foibles of the human condition.

Oops, while I was in my soapbox son-of glory I forgot the most important part: the cartoon itself. This was the first time I’ve seen it. I thought it really worked surprisingly well on several different levels, especially for the Famous era in which it was made. I loved it…and I’ve seen my share of duds with my father’s name on them. Two parts that stick with me: the husband’s view of the back of his wife’s head, shown a couple of times, and; the animation of the pool taking on the pattern of the alligator’s thrashing tail. Not sure who animated that part. Whomever, great job.

What the worst kind of white feminists (and I’m including white male-feminists, like the spineless gits in this thread) try to do is pull the “race” card with stuff like the Big Bertha wife. Maybe this would work if this was what all white women were depicted as in the movies (like the smiling ‘spooks’, or Asians preparing “Kamikaze on rice”) but white women were depicted as broadly as the white males. Truth is, yeah, there was a lot of sexism in the world then, but not a lot of it made it to the screen as the white feminists want you to believe. Hell, I’d say that movies are more sexist today than they ever were “then”… You can name reams of broad-ranged actresses from the Golden Age that are icons for things other than their looks, which can’t be said for most of today’s actresses.

“Funny how all the people complaining about this wonderfully biting cartoon are all male…”

Wow.

Do ya think it’s because it’s because women who read Cartoon Brew know when to pick their battles, and pointing out the background radiation of misogyny spread by this Famous series (since that series probably won’t be a blockbuster anywhere in the present market) would be shooting a gnat with an elephant gun?

I’ll worry about upcoming *first-run* cartoons that have a problem with women, rather than rehash all the ways male cartoonists WENT FOR THE GAG regardless of those gags classifying entire categories of people as below white men.

I just wanted to add a big “Thank you” for the posting of this great, fun cartoon that I had never seen, and also thank pspector for joining us and adding his insights. Always interested in hearing more about your dad and his work.

Sorry you had to be subjected to all the absurd weeping, wailing, wringing of hands, rending of garments, pulling of hair, and gnashing of teeth that attends any form of humor on the web these days. Hope you’ll weigh in again.

The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.

The good stuff lives on. I think most of the animators of my generation would love to think that anything we ever did would provoke this much interest in fifty years.

We tried to put our hearts into our work, too, but were always getting ‘em stomped flat!

EastmanColor, not Technicolor