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 [ BACK]  [NEXT]                       Issue #142 - 05/02/1999

OUT OF TOON!

An Animated Look at Cartoons

Hello, All...
     As with most new technologies, at first people thought it
was just a magic trick.  But maybe it was.  When American
cartoonist Windsor McCay invented the character "Gertie the
Dinosaur" in 1914, he did tap into something magical.  Gertie
wasn't the first attempt at movie animation, but she was the
first to show that a series of drawings on paper combined with
imagination could become a unique personality.  Though Gertie was
extremely popular, McCay didn't become the Walt Disney of his day
because he animated the film virtually alone, making all of the
drawings himself.  No artist could keep up that kind of pace --
even a simple film represents at least a thousand drawings for
every minute of screen time.  Real animated success waited for
the 1930's and the Disney factory methods.  Even today with the
assistance of computers and copying machines, animation remains
expensive.  Cost is the reason that the American TV show "The
Simpsons" is animated in Korea.
     We tend think of cartoons as being bright and cute
entertainment for children, but many of the best remembered
scenes, especially from the old Disney movies, are the dark
moments that scared the heck out of us when we were kids. 
Disney's feature movies were so successful because he was good at
using the cute characters to hide the really primal fears his 
cartoons expressed.  "Dumbo" and "Pinocchio" are cute, bright and
fast moving.  But the movies also express fears of falling,
danger, rejection and loss of parents that are as expressive as
anything ever put on film.
     We are lucky to be able to draw on the contributions of so
many talented people to produce Sunday Funnies.  Just like the
art of animation, putting this together every week is a
collaborative effort.  Thanks this week to:  Jerry Taff, Carol
Becwar, Alison Becwar, Paul Roser, Sylvia Libin He, Jamie Lynn,
Yukari Kawabata, Timothy McChain, Mark Becwar, Karen J. Crooker,
Scott Grieg, Kerry Miller, Larry Ford, and Peter Adler.  Disney
and other studios are still making popular animated films,
telling stories that would be hard to visualize any other way, as
in last year's movie "Antz."  And, with the recent developments
in computer animation, some are predicting that animated
characters might even replace real-life actors.  The classic
animated movies remain popular, too.  Porky Pig was wrong all
those years ago - maybe he should have been saying "That's _NOT_
all, folks!"
     Have A Great Week,

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DRAW UP A COUCH...
---------------
     It is often said that the classic cartoon characters all
succeeded because they had unique personalities.  That may be
true, but it's clear that they are also a pretty dysfunctional
group of characters.  If the "Toontown" shown in the movie "Who
Framed Roger Rabbit" really existed, the most popular gathering
spot in town would probably be the psychiatric clinic.  Here are
the diagnoses for a few of the best known cartoon characters:


 Bugs Bunny  - Freud would have had a field day with the rabbit's
               confused sexuality.  The Bugs has serious
               transvestite tendencies - when he wears any
               clothing at all, it's almost always a dress.  And
               he has kissed more male co-stars than any of
               Hollywood's leading ladies.

 Elmer Fudd  - It's hard to understand if Elmer's hunting is just
               for sport or something more devious.  Of all of
               the classic Warner's characters, Elmer is the most
               perpwexing.  There's something vewy stwange about
               the way wistening to him makes you want to wush
               out and chase wabbits.

 Pepe Le Pew - A classic sexual predator; rather than focus on a
               female who might enjoy his company, he is only
               attracted by rejection.  How he's avoided
               harassment suits all these years, I'll never know. 

 Daffy Duck  - An unpredictable, bouncing-off-the-walls character
               full of wild vengeance against unseen foes.  Hard
               to explain that level of paranoia unless the
               little black duck is using some powerful illegal
               substances.

 Wile E. Coyote - An obsessive/compulsive personality if there
               ever was one.  His long string of defeats speak of
               a fear of success and his failures are always of
               his own making.  Maybe, on some level, he doesn't
               really want to catch the Road Runner.  He could
               make a team of psychiatrists very rich.

 Yosemite Sam -  Short, loud and hostile - and those are his good
               points.  Sam's abusiveness and violence at every
               turn speak of a classic Napoleon complex.  Either
               that or his underwear is too tight.

 Popeye the Sailor  -  Cartoon land's health food cultist.  If it
               wasn't spinach, it would have been oat bran,
               blackstrap molasses or some other weird food
               fetish.  No wonder his girlfriend Olive Oyl is
               anorexic.

 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs - Why would a pretty, unmarried
               young lady move in with seven dirty old men? 
               (Remember, she had to teach them to wash.)  Could
               the fact that they own a diamond mine have
               anything to do with it?  Maybe Snowy just drifted
               in to load up on the old guys' cash.  Which would
               put quite a different spin on the phrase, "Hi,
               Ho!"


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A MESSAGE TO GRACIAS...
--------------------
     After four months of silence last summer, Mexican
authorities finally heard from the charismatic Zapatista rebel
leader Subcommander Marcos.  Not that it helped them figure out
much about what he wanted or how to deal with him.
     "Yepa, yepa, yepa!  Andale, andale!  Arriba, arriba!" the
rebel leader announced in a communique to the Mexican Army.  The
letter in Spanish was signed using Marcos' distinctive signature,
so authorities believe it to be authentic.  Those phrases are
quotes from the cartoon mouse Speedy Gonzalez, which was
confirmed by the full title  below the signature: "Insurgent
Subcommander Marcos; followed by "alias 'Sub Speedy Gonzalez.'"
     And that was all it said.
     Authorities had been speculating that Marcos was dead, since
he hadn't sent any messages and was believed to be holed up in
the jungles of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border.
     The message may have been Marcos' way of claiming the title
as "the fastest rebel leader in all Mexico."  (Reuters)


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HE HAD NO IDEA...
--------------
     The Warner Brothers animation department of the 1940's and
50's invented more popular continuing characters than any other
studio and made memorable cartoons on hundreds of subjects.  The
question is, how did they maintain that level of creativity and
come up with all of those great ideas?
     According to legendary animator Chuck Jones, they relied on
the unerring judgement of their manager, Eddie Seltzer.  Seltzer
had all of the qualities you'd look for to manage this unique
group of talented artists:  he couldn't write or draw, was ill-
tempered, cheap, dictatorial, and had no sense of humor.  He was,
however, a friend of studio head Jack Warner, which explains a
lot about how he got there.
     In fact, Selzer had such a poor sense of humor that whenever
he hated an idea, the artists and writers knew that they had a
winner.  For example, Selzer's negative reaction to a comic
French accent used in one movie led directly to the creation of
the character Pepe Le Pew - and an Academy Award in 1949 ("For
Scent-imental Reasons").


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CARTOON PHYSICS 101...
-------------------
     It's obvious that cartoons take place in some part of space
that mirrors our own without being bothered by the same laws of
physics that affect the rest of us.  Here are some of the ways
that the cartoon world differs from real life:


  CARTOON LAW I
     Cartoon magnets have a mysterious uni-directional force to
     attract metallic objects without themselves being attracted
     to them.  This explains why a cartoon character can hold up
     a large magnet and have tons of hardware fly toward him
     without finding himself pulled toward them.

  CARTOON LAW II.
     Any body suspended in space remains immune to gravity until
     made aware of the situation.  Cartoon characters are exempt
     from falling - unless it's funny.  So, Elmer can run off of
     a cliff and stand there in thin air for several seconds,
     until he slowly comprehends that he isn't on solid ground.

  CARTOON LAW III.
     Cartoon characters don't have the usual constraints of
     momentum, which allows toon characters to start, stop and
     turn instantaneously -- or until they hit a telephone pole,
     wall or large boulder.

  CARTOON LAW IV.
     Any body passing through solid matter will leave a
     perforation conforming to its perimeter.  Also called the
     silhouette of passage, this is common for cartoon victims of
     explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to
     escape that they exit directly through the wall, leaving a
     cookie-cutter-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or
     matrimony often catalyzes this reaction.

  CARTOON LAW V.
     The law of differential gravity: despite what Galileo proved
     about all objects falling at the same rate of acceleration,
     everything falls faster than an anvil.

  CARTOON LAW VI.
     The time required for an object to fall twenty stories is
     greater than or equal to the time it takes for a cartoon
     character to spiral down twenty flights of stairs to street
     level.

  CARTOON LAW VII.
     In a cartoon, the normal linkage between friction and
     propulsion is optional.  The feet of a character who is
     running or the wheels of a speeding vehicle do not need to
     touch the ground for them to cause forward motion.  It is
     possible for cartoon characters to stop, reverse direction
     and accelerate without ever touching a solid surface.

  CARTOON LAW VIII.
     Conservation of feline matter - cartoon cats easily survive
     being flattened, pleated, shattered or electrocuted.  We
     derive from this that cartoon cat matter can neither be
     created nor destroyed.

  CARTOON LAW IX.
     As speed increases, objects can be in several places at the
     same time, or disappear completely.  Increasing speed tends
     to elongate and distort matter in an Einsteinian manner,
     even at velocities far less than the speed of light.

  CARTOON LAW X.
     As confusing as the cartoon landscape may be, it is littered
     with invisible, descriptive signs that only become visible
     when picked up by a leading cartoon character.  Like the
     "Sucker!" signs that Bugs Bunny is always pointing at Elmer
     at appropriate moments.

  CARTOON LAW XI.
     A character can pass through a solid wall painted to look
     like a tunnel entrance only if that character is unaware of
     the deception.  Whether this is a question of art, science
     or philosophy is still open to debate.

  CARTOON LAW XII.
     Conservation of angular vengeance - for every act of
     vengeance, there is an equal and opposite re-vengeance.

  CARTOON LAW XIII.
     The law of anatomical Averyzation.  The flexible property of
     cartoon matter that allows toon characters to have mega-
     reactions to emotional events, such as a character's jaw
     dropping five feet to the ground or eyes growing to fifty
     times normal size in surprise.


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THE TRUTH ABOUT CATS AND DOGS...
-----------------------------
     You've seen this scene in a thousand cartoons - the dog
watches gleefully as his arch rival, the cat, somehow gets stuck
tumbling around in a hot clothes dryer.
     But that's not what happened in real life when Zoe the cat
ended up in the dryer.  The dog in question, named Hudson, kept
barking until his owner realized there must be something wrong.
     "At first I thought Hudson wanted to go outside, but he just
kept on barking and staring at the machine," said Liz Beaumont,
the animals' owner.
     Opening the door of the dryer, Beaumont discovered the
slightly-scorched Zoe, who was so hot her owner had to use a
towel to remove her.
     In a cartoon, the last scene would be Zoe and Hudson curled
up together on the same blanket, right?  Not in real life.
     "Funny thing is, Zoe still hates Hudson and there's no sign
of a reconciliation," said Beaumont.  (REUTERS)


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LIFE IMITATES ART
-----------------
     Police in Montreal knew they were looking for a very unusual
bank robber.  For one thing, he was robbing bank after bank while
wearing a home-made suit of armor.  That and he always scattered
tacks and nails behind him as he fled the banks to delay pursuit. 
For some reason, he also refused to wear a helmet.
     By now, you're picturing Wile E. Bank Robber, right?  All
that's missing is the box saying: "One Genuine Acme Do-It-
Yourself Armor Kit."
     One other similarity to a cartoon: the suit of armor was so
heavy that the robber couldn't outrun pursuing police, who
brought down the bandit with a blow to the head.
          [ He's lucky...  They could have dropped an
          anvil on him. ]


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© 1999 by Bill Becwar. All Rights Reserved.