Take stories from one of the world’s greatest authors, an airship, Adam and Eve, and even the Devil, mix well into a story, and you’ve got The Adventures of Mark Twain. It’s one of the more offbeat and original projects from legendary director Will Vinton, best known for his work with Claymation, the unique stop-motion animation style.
The film, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, was inspired by a statement Twain once made about his connection to Hailey’s Comet: “I came in with Hailey’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Hailey’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”
Shortly after Hailey’s Comet appeared again, Mark Twain passed away on April 21, 1910.
For The Adventures of Mark Twain, Vinton’s wife, Susan Shadburne, crafted the screenplay after extensively researching Twain’s life and his work. The story relays a fictional journey where the author pilots an airship to meet up with Hailey’s Comet. Stowing away aboard the ship are three of Twain’s famous fictional characters: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher.
Will Vinton – with “Mark Twain”
They all stumble upon Adam and Eve in a segment inspired by Twain’s “Eve’s Diary” and “Extracts from Adam’s Diary.” The film spends a good segment of time here in some darkly humorous and “cartoony” segments. Eve embraces animals, feels bad for fish living in the water, brings them home, and lays them all on the bed. “I don’t see them any happier than they were before,” noted Adam, “Only quieter.” After this, one of the fish lays on its side, its tongue hanging out.
The door to the elevator then opens to reveal a scene from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. It’s after this brief interlude that The Adventures of Mark Twain delves into its darkest moment, inspired by Twain’s story “The Chronicles of Young Satan,” where they all meet with a character first called “The Mysterious Stranger,” (the title of the novella that includes the aforementioned story) who then reveals themselves to be Satan.
Satan is brought to the screen with some disturbing yet compelling animation designs. A shape-shifting face, resembling the theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy (mostly tragedy), and an eerie, electronic whisper of a voice. Satan demonstrates how he controls the lives of small, helpless, little humanistic characters, who he proceeds to destroy in a catastrophic earthquake.
From here, Tom, Huck, and Becky fearing for their own lives, believe that Twain is on a suicidal collision course with the comet. They decide to tie Twain up to thwart his plan, but he mysteriously escapes, and the three kids soon learn that while Twain plans on meeting up with the comet, he wants Tom, Huck, and Becky to be unharmed.
What follows is a series of events that involves meeting with Twain’s “darker side” and flying the airship through the heart of Hailey’s Comet. In the conclusion, they all make it through the comet, where Twain imparts wisdom (taken from the author’s famous quotes), and Twain dissolves, transitioning into a figure in the clouds.
Tom, Huck, and Becky pilot the airship, leading them to decide to write about their adventures, as the closing credit declares: “The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huck Finn.”
Vinton financed the film, which took three and a half years to complete, using profits from his studio’s commercial work.
The time and effort are all there on the screen. The character animation of Mark Twain (with the perfect voice of actor James Whitmore, who was filmed while performing the role, for reference by the animators) is full of personality, and the detail of the Claymation throughout the film is nothing short of a marvel.
From the comedic back-and-forth of Adam and Eve to the dynamically staged action sequence at the film’s conclusion, as well as the eerie morphing of “The Mysterious Stranger,” the hand-crafted artistry of The Adventures of Mark Twain is on full display.
Forty years after its release, the film has also become remembered for that segment that brings Satan into the story. A simple Google Search brings up a number of online discussions about the scene. While off-putting and unsettling, the sequence demonstrates how impactful animation can be when it embraces a darker tone.
It is ambitious, as is all of The Adventures of Mark Twain, taking decidedly different stories and characters and also taking some chances.
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
This film was run on The Disney Channel in the mid-80’s. Not only is it somewhat dark but also reflects much of the cynicism that informed Samuel Clemens’ later work. The Adam and Eve section, along with many other segments of the film, is particularly “adult” in tone. As a tribute to Mark Twain, this film is a reminder that the world of his fiction is not all sunshine and humor, but also contains some bitterness, disillusionment, and despondency. To realize all of this in a film intended for family audiences was a bold step indeed for Will Vinton, who at the time had quite a reputation for raising “claymation” to an art form.
The Disney Channel also showed a live action film based on “The Mysterious Stranger.” Often the programming would pay homage to a certain author or other celebrity, and if I recall correctly there was a Mark Twain month at least once. As for Tom, Huck, and Becky, this was not their only encounter with animation. Years earlier, in the late 60’s, ahead of “The Adventures of Mark Twain,” they were the live action characters who met up with animated figures from literature and myth in the Hanna-Barbera series “The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
Don’t forget WDP’s 1979 adaptation of ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court’ (with an astronaut in the title role)!
I seem to remember first watching it on syndicated television as an SFM Holiday special feature sometime in the early 80’s, iirc. Then the Showtime movie network ran it in the mid-80’s before the Disney Channel had their turn to run it. The concensus of later generations of kids who’ve seen the film have deemed it “nightmare fuel”, understandably so with it’s generally dark, grim premise, along with Vinton’s flair for keeping the action visually captivating, to a disarmingly eerie degree at times, with amazingly smooth, fluid animation, utilized to great effect in the morphing sequences for the Mysterious Stranger segment,
I remember watching H-B’s “The New Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn” when it was in syndication in the 70’s. In just about every episode of the series, the adversary was played by Jack “Lurch” Cassidy, including their literary nemesis Injun Joe. In fact, H-B kept Cassidy pretty busy around the time that series first aired, as he was consequently cast as the titanic robot hero of the “Frankenstein Jr. and The Impossibles” series (which incidentally has finally made it’s way to Blu-ray, as reported earlier on this site) then later reprising his most famous role for the first animated adaptation of “The Addams Family”.
I believe he wasn’t actually the Devil in the story – he was Satan’s nephew or cousin or something, but had the same name. At least in the copy of the story I’ve had since I was a kid. I understand there are different editions out there.
Still, it is remarkable they were able to have such a character and still manage to get a G rating. The sequences with Captain Stormcloud were kind of pushing it, as well.
Besides the eerie Mysterious Stranger sequence, there was a scene of Twain playing an organ with moaning statues instead of pipes. It’s just there, not drawing on any specific work I know of, but implying grief at the heart of his work.
Were any of the segments ever stand-alone shorts? It seems the movie was designed to allow that. If memory serves, freestanding bits of Bill Plympton’s “The Tune” ran on MTV before the feature appeared, in part to help finance the larger project.
Mr. Clemens’ writing did become much darker in his last years. Having lost his wife and one of his two daughters to diseases which, not much later, became curable, and having helped a dying Ulysses S. Grant write and publish his memoirs, he was surrounded by mortality, and was also indignant about the United States promising to liberate the Philippines from Spain, and then becoming the new colonial power instead of granting the country the promised independence. His political writings aren’t well known today, although the U. C. Berkeley Press did publish a collection of them back in the 1970’s or 80’s, with the title “A Pen Warmed Up In Hell.”
His darkest work is appropriately entitled, “The Great Dark,” and its subject is a truly terrifying, nightmarish voyage on a doomed sailing ship.
Too bad that the immensely talented Mr. Vinton didn’t film THAT story, as a sequel! But it wouldn’t have been “kid-friendly,” either in the late 20th century— or now.
When we seem to be on a very dark voyage indeed, but I’ll keep in mind that Cartoon Research isn’t the place for political commentary. So, enough of that! But at least in this instance, it has some relevance.
Interesting to note how Vinton in that posted photo bears a striking resemblance to both Lee Mendelson AND Vince Guaraldi with that incredibly stylish handlebar moustache. So it wouldn’t surprise me if he considered Mendelson an influence in his line of work.
I presume the “commercial work” of which the profits helped fund this feature included his animation of The Noid character for Domino’s Pizza and his equally popular work for the California Raisins campaign?
in 1979 or maybe 1980 a group of film students , myself and my film professor at st Petersburg college went to the Tampa Theater to see Will Vinton who was showing his shorts Closed Mondays and many others with q and a from the audience, when we arrived the four of us it was sadly apparent that we were with only a few others, hardly 15 of us in a silent film palace that could seat 2800 . Mr Vinton said after showing the scheduled shorts,.. hey you guys would you like to see some raw footage of the film I’m working on , it’s in my truck I’ll be right back ,why don’t you all come up to first row , I’d love to see what you think of it…well it was footage of the adventures of Mark Twain…can you imagine how we all felt , his humble good natured humor , at first I felt sad that not more people were there…then I felt honored to among so lucky a group to see this work in its unfinished glory , Mr Vinton was like a kid , saying do you like what I’ve got so far..what night nothing could have prepared any of us to be seeing his work, and to be with such a kind humble man, years later I saw the complete work on PBS by then he done return to Oz and the California grapes commercials fame and Oscars , but every time I saw him interviewed he was always king humble and just so happy to share his life and art, I will never forget this great man I was so honored to have met him.
One of my favorite things is a DVD of his Little Prince, Rip Van Winkle, and Martin the Cobbler, autographed by Vinton. Even as a kid, I knew who Will Vinton was, thanks to HBO showing many of his shorts. He was a genius, sadly tossed aside during his final years.