Animation Anecdotes #355
Actor Vincent Price, at the age of 75, thought playing Rattigan in The Great Mouse Detective would be an interesting challenge so he agreed to audition for the job.
Actor Vincent Price, at the age of 75, thought playing Rattigan in The Great Mouse Detective would be an interesting challenge so he agreed to audition for the job.
Actresses Cynthia Leake and Emma Samms were among the rotoscoped performers for Teegra in Bakshi’s “Fire and Ice” – a character named on the Frazetta model sheet as “Tygra” .
“Mighty Mouse represents me wanting to entertain people,” says Ralph Bakshi. “I’m allowing myself to have more fun. I want to make people fall on the floor laughing.”
Our annual round-up of obscure anecdotes relating to (mostly) obscure Christmas TV Specials. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!
Don Bluth recalls, “Many people were saying, ‘Don’t touch animation. It’s a dinosaur that doesn’t work anymore’. But American Tail went on to gross over $150 million and suddenly, it looked viable again”.
As a baby boomer raised on the Terrytoons’ Mighty Heroes, I was delighted when its creator, Ralph Bakshi, granted me an interview for my latest mini-book.
“I wanted to know what a full-grown adult male was doing living with three lower life forms, forcing them to sing and go to school and wear human clothing.”
Ralph Bakshi was working in 1989 on selling an animated series to NBC called Hound Town – about a group of dogs who observe the curious habits of humans.
From Entertainment Weekly, November 13th, 1992 on Disney’s Aladdin: “A voiceless, faceless and limbless magic carpet speaks volumes with only body language.”
Paramount Pictures closed its cartoon studio in December 1967. The studio’s last cartoons were distributed well into 1968, and most of them came and went without any notice in newspapers.