Woody Woodpecker & the Avant-Garde
Almost seventy years after it closed, an exhibit will open soon to celebrate the influence of a long-ago art gallery that had a big influence on cinema – and especially Woody cartoons.
Category Archives: WALTER LANTZ ARCHIVE
LaVerne Harding: Drawing with Resolve
Harding was part of a collective effort by the Universal animators that resulted in Walter Lantz taking his studio fully independent, just one of the many understated accomplishments of this remarkable woman.
Cynical Susie, a Fix-it Feminist
What did Susie of the comics pages have in common with her creator, animator LaVerne Harding? She fixed things. And maybe more than anyone thinks.
Grim and Bugs: The Art of the Pitch
A game of horseshoe that started at the Iwerks studio and ended at Lantz, played between two animation legends, Grim Natwick and Bugs Hardaway.
Nellie, Lost in the Clouds, 1939
A cartoon that time forgot and a sequence that was never made, featuring a Buck Rogers rocket ride and an airborne finale way up in the clouds.
Dick Kinney: Taking Falls in a Barrel
A favorite theme of this Lantz storyman was the unusual feat of riding a barrel over Niagara Falls, yet the unlikely path of this river leads all the way to Brazil.
The Birth of a Toothpick, 1939
Burt Gillett made a lost classic that very few are aware of, being the oddball entry within a short-lived animated series, but here’s betting you enjoy watching his delusional hero voiced by Mel Blanc.
Dauntless Dan Smells a Rat? 1939
The villainous Rudolf Ratbone was outdone by the heroine Nellie in this short-lived Lantz Cartune series that spoofed 1890s melodramas.
Hank Ketcham, Before and In-Between, 1938
Prior to his fame as the creator of Dennis the Menace, this cartoonist put in his time working in obscurity in what he called the “Black Hole” of the Lantz studio.
Bugs Hardaway of Battery D
When it came over the radio that FDR had died, the story team at Lantz Productions went quiet, and then the former artillery sergeant said, “Harry’s the President.”
