My 2 cents (and a nickel) on today's MoMA Cinemascope Cartoon Screening

[Emmanuel Cruz]

Hello all. Today, I went to the Cinemascope cartoon screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I had a really great time. The cartoons shown were pretty good. They screened:

Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (Disney)
Grand Canyonscope (Disney)
Gerald McBoing Boing on Planet Moo (UPA)
Magoo Goes West (UPA)
Blue Cat Blues (MGM)
Scat Cats (MGM)
Lucky Dog (Terrytoons)
Topsy TV (Terrytoons)
Foofle's Train Ride (Terrytoons)
The Pink Panther-Title Sequence (United Artists/De-Patie Freleng)
The Juggler of Our Lady (Terrytoons)

The prints of the Disney cartoons were great, while the others were ok. Overall, the screening was great and the cartoons were great. I give it 9 out of 10.

By the way, there were some Toon Zone members there. They were me, Nelson, Brian, and Eileen. Jerry Beck talked to us after the screening for a while, and told us many things about upcoming projects, restorations, and so on. If someone who went to the screening can write what he told us (Nelson, most likely) I would appreciate it. We did get free copies of Animation Blast, Jerry signed some books, and my dad took a picture with the crew. When it develops, I'll post it. (Or someone else can, since I don't know how to do it. :p )

Anyhoo, it was a great time. Too bad most of you guys didn't make it. It was great.

Adios, amigos!

-Emmanuel :bosko:

[Jon Cooke]

Awww, man... I wish I could have gone. Sounds like a great show! :( :(

Maybe next time,


-Jon

[Thad Komorowski]

Yeah, it sounded like oodles of fun. I could've actually WENT this weekend, but NYC is over 500 miles away from here, so........:p



Thad K

[Howard Fein]

I went to the Friday night screening only because I had a prior committment Saturday. Too bad- it seems like the Saturday showing was much more rewarding. I was hoping there'd be a post-show bull session with Jerry and any other animation fans in the audience, but we were shooed out of the theatre as soon as the lights came on. :(

With the exception of SCAT CATS,which is regularly shown on CN, all the shorts were relatively rare to me. BLUE CAT BLUES used to be shown a lot in syndication and on TBS/TNT, but its central theme of suicide has obviously banned it from CN. I remember seeing the two Disney shorts from time to time on NBC Sunday nights. (By the time my cable system changed Disney from premium to cable, the classic shorts were no longer shown! :mad: ) Nick used to show theatrical UPA on WEINERVILLE; Terrytoons were last seen on USA in '94 or so.

Most of the shorts, except for GRAND CANYONSCOPE, didn't seem to take too much advantage of the Cinemascope technique. It's also striking how modern Disney shorts looked in 1954. The graphics, color and animation made them look at least ten years newer than contemporary Famous, Terry, or even WB cartoons. The liberal use of racial stereotypes in TWP&B, even in an abstract context- many Chinese and Negro caracetures-, was also a bit shocking. Somehow I always regarded Disney as too 'classy' to resort to the 'crude' humor common to WB and MGM. :rolleyes:

The theatrical Magoos seem to rely more on character, sitauation and Jim Backus' ad-libbing than the heavy slapstick element of the made-for-TV UPAs, in which Waldo, Cholly and Worcesteshire the butler would constantly take heavy circumstantial abuse for their charge's, er, handicap. MAGOO GOES WEST had one visually intriguing sequence showing him driving all day and night (with headlights ablaze) around a park fountain. McBOING-BOING had a couple of eyebrow-raising moments: In one, our hero 'shoots' a playmate, all in fun, with a realistic sound effect; throughout the film, the inhabitants of Moo are fluent in what would have been humorously distorted English in 1955- but what today sounds strongly like Ebonics (substituting "be" for "am" and are"). :eek:

The Deitch Terrytoons were generally not shown in the syndicated packages most of us grew up with, so it was my first look at Foofle and John Doormat. FOOFLE'S TRAIN RIDE seemed very similar to Deitch's T & J shorts, thanks to the title character's muteness, and his tendency to get tangled up in stationery objects like a luggage rack and water cooler- that seems to happen to Tom several times in the Deitches. TOPSY TV was basically an Avery concept (husband goes to escalating lengths to watch his program, only to have wife impossibly appear to rebuke him) with sparse backgrounds and soundtrack.

LUCKY DOG was made pre-Deitch, and has the classic Terrytoon trappings: very loud Shieb score, three sound effects and lots of Carlo Vinci chase animation. I hadn't realized how many one-shots Terry made (until checking Maltin's appendix) because most stations only showed shorts with the mouse, magpies, goose and Durante-esque cat. It also seemed strange to see human characters in a pre-Deitch Terrytoon; perhaps by 1956 it was routine for all studios shelve the funny animals in favor of middle-class suburbanites' comic travails. Warners certainly did their part (WILD WIFE, GOO-GOO GOLIATH, ROCKET-BYE-BABY, MIXED MASTER).

JUGGLER OF OUR LADY was like no Terrytoon made before, during or after Deitch. It's distinctly dark, stylized tone must've been quite unsettling in 1957. And as for the PANTHER titles, he seemed much more like a realistic feline- but his feisty nature was already in place.

Pity there aren't more screenings of old cartoons like this. :(

[J Lee]

When I moved from New York down to Texas, the oppositte was true -- KTVT Ch. 11 in Dallas-Fort Worth was heavily into airing the Cinemascope Terrytoons, along with most of the rest of the 1956-67 output. So you got lots of Clint Clobber, Sidney, Gaston, John Doormat and even the occasional view of The Juggler of our Lady and Flebus ("You are a neurotic"), but the dowside was there was also plenty of Luno the Flying Horse and Possible Possum episodes to have to wade through.