“Uncut, Uncensored & Incredibly Unsuitable for Children!” – Tagline for the 1976 X-rated film “Once Upon a Girl.”
Partly true, folks. The movie is uncut and uncensored, but it is incredibly unsuitable for any audience, unless you are a thirteen-year-old boy in 1976 with a head full of improbable sexual fantasies and a stash of Hustler magazines under your mattress.
This woeful film was produced, directed, and written by one Don Jurwich (although some sources credit Joel Seibel as Producer). Do not assume that Jurwich was a leering smut master; He harkened back to the early days of Jay Ward Productions and served a stint at Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s doing storyboards, layouts, and some writing. In the years after Once Upon a Girl, Jurwich had a long and productive career with HB and Marvel Productions spanning nearly fifty years.
Jurwich was quoted as saying that his group of animators on Once Upon a Girl had worked at Disney; this was stretching things a bit too far. The only person in his crew who could qualify was Bob Trochim, who worked as an assistant animator on Sleeping Beauty (1959). Paro Hozumi was a background artist for multiple DTV productions from about 1990 to 2005. Rene Garcia was an assistant layout artist on The Little Mermaid (1989).
Since these productions came decades after 1986, Jurwich’s claim is highly unlikely. No one else on his film’s animation staff has a single Disney credit at any time. Hal Smith did do voice work for Disney, but never did any animation. However, almost the entire animation department had worked at Hanna-Barbera before (or while) taking on this dreadful project.
Most of the humor for us animation fans comes from clearly seeing the mid-70’s Hanna-Barbera artistic style imposed on the characters as they play Hide-The-Salami in various orifices. It’s almost as if Bill and Joe gave the green light to a porno film. There’s the same limited animation, the same facial designs, the same run/chase cycles, the same vapid faces. These HB clones also get to recite dialogue like “Fucketh you, harlot bitch, fucketh!” or “Look at that little fucker suck!” Need I say that the Funky Phantom never did or said anything of the sort to April Stewart?
The first 5:41 of the movie is a cheesy live-action segment in which Mother Goose (portrayed in drag by Hal Smith, once the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh!) is on trial in some unnamed Southern courtroom on obscenity charges; it seems that she has been retelling classic children’s fairy tales to kids in a manner that would get Larry Flynt tossed in the slammer. In defending herself, Mother Goose begins recounting those same tales in the courtroom.
After the first tale, that of Jack and the Beanstalk, you have seen everything you need to see, roughly twenty minutes into the film’s 1:17 run time. Obscene language, close-ups of female genitalia, raging erections, stiff nipples, and, oh yeah, pimping and bestiality. Enjoy the scene involves Jack reaching the giant’s castle on a phallic beanstalk (watered by his ejaculate); A busty magic harp’s music has all the glasses and silverware in various stages of, um, sexual congress. Soon, the giant’s wife is using Jack as a live dildo.
There follows a filthy version of “Cinderella” featuring lusty, incestuous stepsisters, and a “Little Red Riding Hood” retelling that depicts a rape scene. “Goober and the Ghost Chasers” it ain’t, unless you’d like to imagine every form of sexual depravity set to cut-rate HB animation. Even John Kricfalusi, or that censor-challenger, Bob Clampett, would have disdained this flick.
Giving voices to these characters were Richmond Johnson, Carol Piacente, and Kelly Gordon (the latter two have no previous credits). Most of the voices came from the immortal Frank Welker, but everyone is entitled to one mistake and a paycheck.
Look, honored readers, I’m no prude. Out of respect for your collective good taste in animated films, I have avoided much of the language in this research piece (except for the quoted dialogue). I truly give a fuck about you (oops!). But is there any reason for this trash to exist? Yes. Let me explain.
1972 saw the first X-rated feature film, Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat. In 1973, production began on Charles Swenson’s Dirty Duck (completed in 1974 but not released until 1977). The bandwagon began rolling. When Osama Tezuka released his 1970 film Cleopatra, American distributors renamed it Cleopatra: Queen of Sex and slapped an undeserved X rating on it upon later release…because Fritz had one.
Once Upon a Girl was a 1976 film that fits squarely into the time frame for producers and distributors to cash in on the X-rated animation fad. The problem is, animated depictions of sex depend on considerable exaggeration, which often comes out as more risible than erotic. Exploring Once Upon a Girl for any arousing or erotic content is a fool’s errand. Even the wordplay of the title is unfunny (not to mention ignoring the pleasures of the cowgirl position). I’m a baaaaad boy!
Martin Goodman is a veteran writer specializing in stories about animation. He has written for AWN and Animation Scoop – and lives in Anderson, Indiana.
Well, according to executive producer William Silberkleit (whose commentary graces the DVD of “Once upon a girl”) “moonlighting” “young girls” from Disney animated this movie. As to “Cleopatra”, Fred Patten’s version of its X-rating in connection to “Fritz the Cat” is slightly different (see https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/tezukas-adult-features-cleopatra-1970/).
I was a fifteen-year-old boy in 1976, and at that age any and all sexual fantasies in my head would have been completely improbable. So I guess I was more or less in the right demographic for “Once Upon a Girl”, though I was unaware of the movie’s existence for a very long time.
In the ‘90s there was a set of videotapes titled “Dirty Little Adult Cartoons”, of which I had the first three volumes (there were, I think, five or six in total). The cartoons in these compilations lacked credits, but but to judge by their style and other factors they had apparently been produced in the 1970s by several different studios, mostly in Germany, and they were dubbed (badly) into English by some of the leading American porn stars of the day. If you’ve ever wondered why Amber Lynn and Tom Byron never did more voiceover work, this is why.
One of these dirty cartoons, a Cinderella parody, stood out because of its greater length. The synchrony of the lip movements and the professional-sounding acting performances indicated that its English-language soundtrack was original, and in general the production values were superior to those of the other cartoons in the set. It was also considerably less raunchy. Many years passed before I learned that this segment was taken from “Once Upon a Girl”.
Because of the context in which I initially viewed it, I find the film neither as crude, nor as crudely made, as it’s often accused of being. I’m a little surprised that Hal Smith was involved in it, as I have read that he was a religious man who, in contrast to his most famous role as Mayberry’s town drunk, never took a drink of alcohol in his life. As you say, it was a product of its time, a bygone era when pornography was made using real film and projected onto the big screen in seedy downtown movie theatres. Even the music screams mid-‘70s, all clavinet, fuzz pedal, and Fender Rhodes electric piano.
Long before I ever saw any Dirty Little Adult Cartoons, it occurred to me that sex would probably be one of the easiest things in the world to animate. The animation would consist mainly of cycles, and of course the principle of Squash and Stretch would be employed to maximum effect. The success of animated pornography hinges entirely upon the animator’s skill at drawing nude human figures in an appealing way. Fred Moore could have done it. So could Marc Davis. Preston Blair — he could have done it on his head. Grim Natwick, maybe. But the Hanna-Barbera animators assembled by Don Jurwich for “Once Upon a Girl” clearly didn’t have what it takes.
Oh wow, imagine animators like Fred Moore and Preston Blair animating cartoon pornography.
Bakshi had some really talented animators like Manny Perez, Marty Taras and Irv Spence who could animate that sort of thing in his movies. Manny Perez in particular animated the infamous ménage à quatre/bathtub scene in Fritz the Cat.
In this amazing but somewhat disturbing new age of AI, it would be completely possible to create an X-rated animated cartoon using the drawing styles of Fred Moore and Preston Blair.
Possible? Simple, even. Just scan some of their model sheets of sexy gals of the 40’s into the AI bot’s “brain,” and let it rip. The bot might even suggest a storyline as well as creating “new” drawings of Red Hot Riding Hood, etc., that look like the real deal.
I’ll be first in line for tickets, that’s for sure!
DON’T
I guess I am a bit of a prude. I don’t even like watching that stuff in live action. I suppose those films were a necessary step in proving animation didn’t have to be limited to kids’ entertainment. Maybe they went a little overboard with all that in Japan. But it does make me glad to hear the Tezuka film didn’t really deserve the X rating.
Hal Smith did voices for Disney but never did any animation… I’m a little confused
Perhaps Jurwich should’ve used his Jay Ward connections to get some of the old “Fractured Fairy Tales” writers to punch up the script a bit. Maybe they didn’t “work blue”. A hypothetical ’70s cartoon skin flick directed by Bob Clampett probably would’ve worked though.
It’s a little known (and otherwise useless) fact that ONCE UPON A GIRL was actually based on A NAUGHTY TREASURY OF CLASSIC FAIRY TALES, a more sexually explicit book that was a cross between a storybook spoof and a king-sized Tijuana bible by one “Sir. Rod Q. M’Gurk” (who I later deduced was cartoonist Warren Tufts slumming it under a pseudonym). I have no clue if M’Gurk/Tufts had any involvement in the animated adaptation of his triple-X source material.
Warren Tufts did work at HB, notably as story director on Challenge of the Super Friends, but nothing in my research for the piece links him to this regrettable film. It’s just as well.
well…now I have to see it.
Correction: Hal Smith didn’t voice Winnie the Pooh until after Hollaway retired in the late ’70’s. Smith did voice Owl since the first featurette “Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree” (1966).
They missed the boat… Pinocchio should have been a given.
How about a discussion of “Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle,” an adult spoof of Tarzan that was the subject of a lawsuit by Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc.?