For Terrytoon fiends...

[Sogturtle]

Just for the Terrytoon fans out there... One of the truly rare Paul Terry efforts has turned up on Ebay... The 1942 Terrytoon in question is "School Daze" featuring Nancy (and Sluggo) from the comic strips (United Feature Comic 'Nancy' by Ernie Bushmiller). Terry's thinking at the time must have been "Well if the Fleischer's can animate that Superman comic and make big success of it then why can't I succeed just as well with Nancy and Sluggo!!". :) This is one I can't remember EVER seeing (unless it's slipped by my pea-sized brain:). Although sadly this is a black and white print of the original COLOR Terrytoon. NO word as to if Jim Tyer was in New Rochelle at the time of the making of this cartoon ;)

[J Lee]

If I remember right, Nancy, Sluggo and the rest of the gang are seated at their school desks and explain to the teacher why Nancy comic books are better for them than reading textbooks.

Pretty bland, but the characters are fairly well drawn. God knows how Tyer would have squashed and stretched them if he was in New Rochelle at the time, but Jim was down in Miami in 1942 helping Popeye beat up on the Japs and Germans for the new Famous Studios.

[Sogturtle]

My line about Jim Tyer was a gag, just the twisted idea of Tyer squashing and stretching the comic characters was tooooo good to pass up!!! He was indeed employed by Famous (Paramount) down in Miami (and then New York) at the exact moment this Terrytoon "School Daze" was made. As a matter of fact he receives screen credit on the banned classic "YOU'RE A SAP, MR. JAP" in Aug 1942, one month before the release of Terry's "School Daze". And the truth is that he was used to much better effect (as "head animator"=director and writer) in those first hours of Famous than he would ever be allowed to attain on his return to Terry-town (despite his much admired frenzied, frenetic animation for Paul Terry).

[J Lee]

Tyer's move to New Rochelle from Times Square wasn't exactly a lose-lose situation -- Paul Terry did get a lot more energy into some of his cartoons out of it. But since Terry was a control freak about his story department putting that energy into the same storylines (outside of a few H&J efforts) over and over again was a waste of his talents.

On the other hand, Famous definitely was a big loser in it -- After Tyer's anything-goes animation was replaced by Bill Tytla's tightly controlled draftsmanship, the Paramount character designs started looking a whole lot better beginning around 1946 -- the characters now stayed on model almost all of the time, something that never happened before. But what they gained in design they more than lost in the energy and imagination Tyer brought to his cartoons (the departure of Otto Messmer and some of the other old time Fleischer storymen in the late 40s didn't help, either).

It sounds stange to say about The Greatest Animator of All Time, but as a director, Tytla was a poor man's Robert McKimson and Paramount would have been far better off if the for-all-intents-and-purposes Tytla-for-Tyer swap had never occurred. Who knows -- their non-Popeye cartoons might actually still be getting TV time nowadays if he had hung around.

[Randy Watts]

Jim Tyer is one of the great unsung animators of cartoondom. Given Tytla's output at Famous, I'll take Tyer's loopy, loose, energetic drawings any day.

Randy

[lislebartman]

I'd put Jim Tyer's work in animation on a par with that of Rod Scribner of WB fame. Both had great styles that showed such energy!! Someone should write a bokk about his contributions to classic animation.

[Sogturtle]

John Lee et al~

I wholeheartedly agree that Famous/Paramount certainly got the short end of the stick of the Tytla "the titler" for Jim Tyer trade. (I actually wrote a whole long reply on these lines on the old board, but it was nuked before I could post it!!). Both men were incredibly remarkable animators, but Tytla really had no business directing. To say he was a "poor man's Bob McKimson overdoes the parallel... Whereas Bob McKimson when working with a gifted storyman was capable of being superbly funny! And yes Tyer was essentially the Eastern equivalent of the fabled Rod Scribner.

It's rather comical to think about the fact that Bill Tytla would so want to live on the East Coast that he would be willing to work at either Famous or Terrytoons. He would have been vastly better utilized making industrial, educational or advertising films that could have well featured his massive, weighty animation, than the generally pitiful theatricals that he made for Terry and for Paramount. And it's pathetic to realize that Jim Tyer who in the Thirties was a triple-threat director-storyman-animator at Van Buren and likewise at Famous in the Forties, (after doing some work for major West Coast cartoon studios). Then ends up back at Terrytoons, slaving away for directors like Eddie Donnelly and Mannie Davis, men who were not nearly as talented as Tyer.......Imagine this scenario... What if Tyer had gone back to the West Coast and been hired to work for Mannie Davis's massivley talented brother Art Davis... Think about it, Art having not only gotten the wonderful Emery Hawkins but Jim Tyer also!! And then after the shucking of the Davis unit, Tyer could have done some wild and wooly animation for Mr. Wild and Wooly himself... Tex Avery!!! A couple of interesting notions!!

[J Lee]

Hey Tim --

My comparison of Tyer and McKimson was basically that they were both better animators than they were directors, but Bob had an idea of what he wanted in a cartoon when he took over directing chores (though some things he did were ill-advised), while Bill wanted tight well-drawn animation -- as we've gone over before with the comparisons of the two Tytla-Tyer Popeyes -- in the first cartoon Tyer's style was dominant and in the second, Tytla's was and right after that, Tyer was gone. But he didn't know what he wanted other than that, and therefore was wholly dependant on his storymen.

When they gave him something imaganitve to work with, like in "Service With a Guile," "A Bout With A Trout," or even Tyer's swansong, "Rocket To Mars," he produced good cartoons. But when the best of the old Fleischer storymen left, he was lost at sea by 1948 (though to give Tytla credit, he could only put up with doing one Casper cartoon before he quit -- a man can take only so much degradation, after all).

Thematically, the best match for Tytla on the East Coast probably would have been as an animator in the Willard Bowsky unit at the old Fleischer studios -- Bowsky's two reel color Popeyes and his other cartoons tended to have more menacing characters and images than the Tendlar or Kneitel units did (let's just forget about the Waldman unit), which would be a perfect match for the man who animated Stromboli and the demon from "Night On Bald Mountain." Too bad Bowsky was dead by the time Tytla made the move to Paramount.

[Sogturtle]

Hola John~

I agree with the bulk of your assessment of Bill Tytla. It's just a cryin' shame that he couldn't have chucked his love of Connecticut (and his pride) and gone back to the only place where he was ever truly happy and made peace there at Club Disney!!:). (Though Walt wouldn't have let him:() His directing efforts at Famous are certainly better than Kneitel's, Sparber's or Mr. Hack oooooops I mean Mr. Waldman's. But Tytla's are more akin to watching Jack King's cartoons than anything else (people directing just for the raise in salary, without having any innate directorial creativity...).

And yes you're right, Bowsky (or Shamus Culhane) would have made good directorial masters for Tytla the animator.

[J Lee]

Tim

Walt might have allowed Tytla to come back, after a little groveling, since he did let Ub Iwerks return. What would have been interesting would have been to have seen how Tytla would have been used as a Warners animator during the studio's heyday, rather than his limited work drawing Don Knotts as a fish for "The Incredible Mr. Limpet."
While Tylta's work at Famous was wholly dependant on what his story department gave him, I will say this for Sparber -- at least in the early and mid-1940s --that by having no animation background whatsoever, his cartoons tend to be given over completly to the whims of his head animator. That was great when the head aminator happened to be someone like Tytla (or Eugster or Tendlar), but a-lot-less-great when it was Waldman or Tom Johnson (who did get better in the final days of the Popeye series...). Too bad Tyer couldn't have just remained as the brains behind the Sparber unit.

[Sogturtle]

Hey John~

From what I know of the case, Tytla made overtures through friends still at D*sn*y a number of times and was ignored by Mr. W*lt... Tytla's best friend and former roomie (and former strike-leader) Art Babbit went back for a while and found himself none-too-popular. But Tytla insisted on his dwelling being on the East Coast and so made it all sadly academic. Of course during the strike Art Babbitt animated for Bob Clampett at Leon's (now if we just knew for sure on which cartoons!!!). And yeah I've wondered too about a Tytla as animator at Schlesinger/Warners in his prime, something we'll never know (except the giantesque Elmer-viking shadow tribute to Tytla's "Night On Bald Mountain" devil in "What's Opera Doc?", cute stream-of-consciousness gag since Elmer is of course... bald:p).

As for Ub's return to Rodent City, it appears to have been a verrrrrry cold arrangement despite all the weird claims about him being so thrilled to just invent and not have to draw or direct anymore... Grim Natwick stated that Ub said very quietly that Walt never spoke to him, ever again!!!. In a pair of "Kansas City Film Ad" reunion photos from the Forties Ub is positioned a ways away from Walt. I think this tells us a fair amount about their relationship after Ub's return...

And yeah John, you are right that (former head-animator) Seymour Kneitel (like Bill Tytla) took a far more active role in directing than non-animator Sparber, much to Kneitel's cartoons detriment. My estimation is that Sparber basically took Dave Fleischer as role model and oversaw some of the writing and then recorded the soundtrack and let it go at that. Whatever the "head-animators" turned out was good enough for him. But I'll tell ya, it's just amazing that the people at Famous never stopped and said, "Hey instead of imitating ourselves over and over why don't we try to hire some of those talented guys from Warners or MGM and remake this whole place, maybe it can be as big as MGM or Warners".

[J Lee]

Tim --

Famous certainly had the takent to do better cartoons than what emerged from the shop after 1948. I don't know if it was just because when they found a character that worked just a little bit (Casper, Herman, etic.) they just got ultra-cautious and decided to reuse the same story from four or five successful cartoons over and over again ( to be specific, "A Haunting We Will Go," "Naughty But Mice," "The Stupridsticous Cat," "The Lost Dream," and "Quack a Doodle Doo.") or if the East Coast atmosphere, festering from the 1937 Fleischer strike, never allowed a spirit of commradare like at Warners that would allow anything but trite assembly line junk to come out of the studio.

Shamus Culhane was a pretty politically libreral guy in the 1940s and 1950s, but even he couldn't stomach the union activities he found at Paramount in the 1960s (and judging from some of the other comments in his autobiography, the "what's-in-it-for-me?" attitudes he complained about had been ingrained in the studio sinceat least 1943), and said the East Coast Local 869 was a far bigger hindrance to doing good cartoons than the West Coast branch was. Disney's output was hampered for a decade due to the bile from the 1941 strike, so it wouldn't be surprising if similar animosity on the East Coast would derail a far less creative studio.

[Larry T]

Tim and John,
I really enjoyed overseeing your discussions regarding the Bill Tytla/Famous Studios/D*sn*y politics, and I decided to throw in my two cents:

I read somewhere that the reason the post-1948 Famous cartoons featuring the 'Harvey-toon Gang' (Casper, Huey, Audrey, H&K, Buzzy) became so formula was because it was officially declared that the cartoons were forthright to be made with children as the target audience.... and the mentality behind it is that children crave repetition, so why not just take one working plotline and basically fill-in-the-blanks to stretch it out a couple more years :rolleyes: ?

In additon, the cartoons would feature as deliberate tie-ins with the slowly emerging "Paramount Famous Animated Comics" of the day (as well as other merchandise....I'm certain magazines had higher importance at that time than they do today) . I have (and have read) quite a few of those comics from the early 50s, and there are some stories in there, titles and all, that are exactly like their cartoons released in the same period (or vice-versa, they could be loose storyboard translations put into print :confused: ).

That's really too bad, because some of those early renditions are quite lavish and beautifully animated (enjoyable too, except for "Good Boos Tonight" where Casper inadvertently gets the baby fox shot, then carries the dead body around right before our eyes until he buries it, only to curse it to an eternity of playing hide-and-seek with him in its spectral form :p ).

John, please correct me on this one, but I also read that Audrey was a creation to replace Lulu- Famous wanted a mischeivous little girl character to feature prominently in their entertainment product line, but St. John's publishing didn't hold the rights to Lulu- so Paramount phased her out, and Audrey in---- is there any more to this scheme that's worth mentioning?

Tim, you really opened up the possiblity of a great "what-if".... suppose people's opinions of each other was a little less biased, events were timed differently, geography didn't play so much importance, and the planets all lined up like never recorded before.... could we have potentially seen the likes of a studio containing such co-operative talents as this line-up?:



Direction: Robert Clampett / Art Davis / Bob McKimson
Animation: Jim Tyer, Rod Scribner, Emery Hawkins, James Culhane, Ray Patterson, Don Williams, Bill Tytla
Voice Characterization: Mel Blanc, Bea Benaderet

Imagine the cartoons we'd be watching!!:D

[J Lee]

Larry --

Tthe licensing deal has always been the prime speculation as to why they replaced Little Lulu with Little Audrey. Certainly Paramount stood to gain more money from a character they directly owned, and just after they sold Audrey's rights off to Harvey Publishing in 1959 they went back and tried to start up the Little Lulu series again, in an attempt to come up with any character would could connect with the movie-going public (of course, by 1961 the personality animation that carried the Lulu series in the 40s was compltely gone, so the two cartoons they did were even worse than the HBO Little Lulu series of a few years back). That also explains why they would conjure up Goodie Gremlin right after selling off Casper -- lose the character, but keep using the exact same plots and hope the audience doesn't know the difference.

Famous was a deeply conflicted studio in the mid-1940s, especially after Tyer left. World War II and the infulx of Warner writes gave the comedy pacing of the shorts a tremendous boost in the final days of the Fleischer studio, and that carried over for the first few years after Famous was formed. But unlike Warners, or even MGM or Terrytoons, which decided to go with all-out slapstick comedy by 1943, Famous was still trying to be an all-purpose studio -- mostly comedy, of course, but also more dramatic D****y-like stuff, such as the two Raggedy Ann cartoons and , of course, Casper.

"The Friendly Ghost" was a scentimental story with a few comedy bits (and a Casper designed to make it look like he apparently died from a major case of overeating) that no other studio except for Walt's place would touch by 1946, and its two follow-ups were pretty much the same (killing the fox in Casper No. 2 fit in with the causal way Famous would kill off lots of its characters over the years). Other than Mickey, Donald and the gang, Famous had the cute character market almost all to itself by 1949, so it's no wonder Sam Buchwald put the series into regular production.

Also, the scentimental/childish type of cartoon fit in perfectly with the sensibilities of Myron Waldman, who had been shying away from flat-out comedy for years in favor of the "cutesy" stuff with the Betty Boop series back in the 1930s. Waldman was the one who pretty much took the Casper series and ran with it, and I think his quote in Maltin's book was the one about kids craving repetition (he also mentions how the other animators made fun of the series, so at least the people Famous knew what they were getting into).

Outside of Popeye and Lulu, neither of which Paramount owned, none of the Famous characters really made much of an impact between 1943 and 1946. The cartoons were funnier than they would be later on, but they didn't have any breakout characters, while even up in New Rochelle, Terrytoons was profiting from Mighty Mouse and had just begun the Heckle and Jeckyl series. So between 1947 and 1950, the studio apparently decided that if one cartoon with a one-shot character did pretty well in the theaters, they would use the formula over and over again (they were already starting to redo the B&W Popeyes by then, so reusing plots wasn't going to be a big worry and the early Herman cartoons "The Henpecked Rooster" and "Scrappily Married" use almost the exact same plots, though, like Warner's in their remakes, they were able to improve the cartoon the second time around).

So when "Naughty But Mice" got a good reaction in 1947, they dusted off the plot a few years later and turned it into the Herman and Katnip series. Same thing with Buzzy and "The Stupidsticious Cat," though Katnip was dumber than the Jack Benny cat in the original.

Audrey, of couse, was just a continuation of the Lulu series in a different body, but since Famous had some of their best luck with putting Lulu into dream sequences, Audrey became practically narcoleptic, falling asleep and dreaming in at least a half dozen of her earliest cartoons. And the Waldman influence was felt here, too -- Audrey was cuter, and far less of a troublemaker than Lulu was ... at least when she could manage to stay awake. She only was really bad when she was in REM state, at least until her final few cartoons in the late 1950s.

Baby Huey was the only Famous cartoon that went into regular series production right after the first one ("Quack-a-Doodle Do") came out in 1950, instead of waiting a year or two. But while the big duck bears a lot of resemblence to Jones' Junior Bear, Famous for some reason -- possibly to appeal to kids and make the stories more suitable for the comic books -- didn't think to pair him with his father for 4 1/2 years and cause him all sort of agony. Instead, they rehased the same plot with the fox over and over and over and over....

As far as the directors, I would have like to have seen what Famous would have been like if Culhane and Tyer had stayed and if Bowsky had survived WWII, or for that matter, if the Fleischers had been able to hang onto Mike Maltese, Warren Foster and Tedd Pierce as story men. Though Bowsky and Culhane hated each other, they and Tyer all had strong ideas about what they wanted in a cartoon, and certainly would have done a better job than the flabby stuff that came out of Times Square after 1948. And Kneitel actually directed good cartoons (!) for Max and at Famous up until 1946 or so, because -- like Bill Tytla -- he was as good as the material his writers gave him. After 1946, they usually didn't give him very good stuff (except for the 1957-59 period for some odd reason), so if any or all of the WB wirters had never moved west, even Seymour might have been considered a better director than he is today.

[Larry T]

Hey John,
Hmmmmm- that really explains quite a lot about the Famous studio's output at the time. You're right about how they couldn't improve on their storylines with repetition, and I never thought about the B&W Popeyes' plotlines being redone in colour, although now I'll have to go back and compare them just to see (I'm really not that dense, I did notice similarities before... but now that it's brought to light, it's as obvious as... well, you know.. :o )

Plus, that description of Audrey being narcoleptic was right on the money- I think the first one where she doesn't have a dream about some adventure is "Hold The Lion Please" where she wants a pet and adopts a lion.... and yep, by her later ones like "Dawg Gawn" and "Surf Bored" she had become the Lulu she was destined to be. When the first Huey cartoon was released in 1948, was he featured in "Paramount Animated Comics"yet? Plus, would you verify for me if Joe Oriolo's Casper was in print before the cartoons? I'm pretty sure he was, but a lot happened at once then, and that would be interesting to know. (I overheard talk once about one of the stories actually telling how Casper originally died....?)

Even though some of the B&W Popeyes were redone later as colour Famous cartoons, you know, a lot of them are really pretty funny...... I think they were Kneitels (except for a few Tytlas), which verifies that which you stated earlier, like "Puppet Love", "The Anvil Chorus Girl", "Royal Floor Flusher" and "Shape Ahoy".... they really are quite funny!!

:D

[Bobby B]

Originally posted by J Lee
Larry --

Tthe licensing deal has always been the prime speculation as to why they replaced Little Lulu with Little Audrey. Certainly Paramount stood to gain more money from a character they directly owned, and just after they sold Audrey's rights off to Harvey Publishing in 1959 they went back and tried to start up the Little Lulu series again, in an attempt to come up with any character would could connect with the movie-going public (of course, by 1961 the personality animation that carried the Lulu series in the 40s was compltely gone, so the two cartoons they did were even worse than the HBO Little Lulu series of a few years back). That also explains why they would conjure up Goodie Gremlin right after selling off Casper -- lose the character, but keep using the exact same plots and hope the audience doesn't know the difference.



They also came up with a new cat-and-mouse team, Skit and Skat, to take the place of Herman and Katnip.