First, in Thunderbeanland:
The school year has sort of unofficially started here with lots of meetings and organizing; It’s this time of year that I really try to get my head back to my full-time job… but I really still have my head in the things we’ve had in progress all summer.
The Rainbow Parades, volume 2 blu-ray set is rounding the final corner. I’m in final tweaks on my end here, and over the next week or so I’m hoping things will be ready to start sending to the brain trust to take a look at. Getting the color balanced on each film is the biggest goal now that the cleanup/restoration is finished, so having lots of feedback will be helpful in the final adjustments on the films. I’m excited to get this title finally out and off the plate – and replace it with intense work on the Comi-Color sets.
There’s two other projects taking most of my time right now, and one of them is the Bunin Alice in Wonderland set. The feature itself is getting a lot of work right now, and I’ve been getting additional materials to help. What exists is really varied in terms of color and grain, so everything helps. An additional 35mm print arrived this week, and another is on its way. As we get closer I’ll be talking more about this project and sharing some of the materials.
There’s another (non-blu-ray) project near and dear to me that is also a pretty quiet one! This involves a lot of trips to Los Angeles, but the final results will be worth the time and effort a small group of folks is putting into it. I’m sure you will all hear more about this project soon as well.
And now — A break from the world — and some enjoyable Terrytoons animation: Little Roquefort in Seasick Sailors (1951)
I hadn’t seen this cartoon in a while – but acquiring a nice old 16mm Kodachrome of it, and found myself thoroughly enjoying the animation. This short, directed by Mannie Davis, isn’t at the top level of Terry shorts in the story department (credited to Tom Morrison here), but if you decide you’re not requiring a classic cartoon, it’s pretty enjoyable- whether you’re familiar with Terrytoon animators from the 40s or 50s or not. I found myself especially enjoying all the music accents and individual animator’s timing. It’s a cartoon equivalent of a good early 50s funny animal comic book.
There’s some wonderful dance animation early in the picture (by Carlo Vinci) with Roquefort dancing with an imaginary Hawaiian Mouse and continuing into his house, packing a bag and off to a vacation, followed by an extended sequence by Jim Tyer with some pretty enjoyable poses and timing. There’s a sequence with Roquefort laughing and continuing that’s a fun watch as well, and reminds me of some of Tyer’s work at Famous.
While not a top Terrytoon, I hope you enjoy it— and it’s nice to see an older, spliceless print with the original titles and end titles. Have a good week all!
Steve Stanchfield is an animator, educator and film archivist. He runs Thunderbean Animation, an animation studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has compiled over a dozen archival animation DVD collections devoted to such subjects at Private Snafu, The Little King and the infamous Cubby Bear. Steve is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
Oh, I remember the “little Roquefort“ cartoons very well. Not as vividly as I would remember “Tom and Jerry“ because the Paul Terry cartoons seemed to have vanished from television by the time I discovered the MGM cat and mouse. They were still on the air sporadically, but not enough that I would remember them as vividly. Yet, I still like them. Even in their sameness in soundtrack, I just remember The visual antics of the cartoons and the way the characters were drawn in their violence. If I remember somewhat correctly, Tom and Jerry cartoons were funny. You never really felt that the cat was being abused or anything like that, yet in a Paul Terry, cartoon, it wasn’t just shoving something down the cats face and changing his appearance. It was seeing something jammed down his throat, and you actually felt the pain of it! This is what I dimly recall. I’m not trying to downplay the cartoon. They were moments of incredible humor! But it was just about the chaotic battle between the cat and mouse that I remember most. There were gags that were very similar to either Tom and Jerry or Herman and catnip cartoons, and many have pointed those out in subsequent articles. Anyway, thanks for sharing this. We all need more of the TERRYTOONS cartoons in our collections. Let’s reacquaint ourselves with them, instead of listening to my ramblings of what I mildly remember from seeing the cartoons each afternoon on television.
Film frame at 3:10 used as illustration in Of Mice and Magic (p.143).
It’s become a cliché to say that the Little Roquefort series is a blatant ripoff of MGM’s Tom and Jerry, even though Paul Terry was making cat-and-mouse cartoons way back when Bill and Joe were still schoolboys. The question is, did it add anything new to the genre? The answer, believe it or not, is yes. After all, in the very first Little Roquefort cartoon, “Cat Happy”, Percy gets high on catnip and starts talking like Hugh Herbert while undergoing a Tyer-rific metamorphosis. Tom never did anything like that, let alone Katnip.
Although Little Roquefort and Percy are far from my favourite Terrytoons characters, I have a special fondness for “Pastry Panic”. My brother had it on a Super 8 reel, and it was one of the first cartoons that I was able to examine frame-by-frame. I did not yet know the name Jim Tyer, but I could see that something very weird and wonderful was going on in that animation.
“Seasick Sailors” is another good one. At least it takes the two of them out of the house for a change. The gag where someone moves a cutout of waves outside a ship’s porthole in order to make the passenger in the cabin feel seasick is something I’ve seen elsewhere, but offhand I can’t remember if it was in another Terrytoon or a cartoon from another studio, or perhaps both. Any answers?
Screwy Squirrel uses the picture-of-waves gag to make the dog )and later himself) seasick.
Yes! That’s the one I was thinking of! Thank you!
On the “cutout wave seasick” gag, I’ve seen it around, Probably from Famous – maybe a Popeye or one of the Buzzies. I think Daffy Duck may have also used it once or twice, along with Tweety in “Tweety’s S.O.S”.
Howard Post actually used the same gag in “Op Bop Wham and Pop” (1966)
If memory serves, the same gag is used in a larger scale form in the Heckle & Jeckle cartoon “Pirate’s Gold,” with the seasick seascape manipulated along the side of the ship.
I likes me (some) Terrytoons, but the stoned cat’s mood swings in CAT HAPPY was derived from the Tom & Jerry PART TIME PAL, where Tom keeps getting drunk and turns friendly each time. And Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS had a sequence of a man of wealth turning on him once he sobered.
I think “Cat Happy” owes less to “Part Time Pal” than to Terry’s own “Catnip Capers”; some of the catnip-induced hallucinations in it were reused in later Terrytoons such as “Somewhere in Egypt” and “King Tut’s Tomb”. Anyway, the trope of the antagonist becoming genial under the influence goes back at least as far as Homer’s Odyssey.
Any sentence featuring”Tyer-rific” and a reference to Hugh “Woowoo” Herbert works for me. WIth fervent hopes that Jerry’s efforts ultimately result in a Blu-ray of Terrytoons, now must watch Dimwit in HOW TO RELAX. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPYBPWWC8ZM
The first time I heard Hugh Herbert’s voice imitated was in a TV commercial of the late ‘60s or early ‘70s for some kind of bathroom cleaner. “Scrubbing bubbles! Scrubbing bubbles! Hoo hoo hoo! That’s us!” Does anyone remember the product?
It was called Dow Bathroom Cleaner at the time. Now, it’s renamed just Scrubbing Bubbles.
Hoo hoo hoo! Thank you!
Ever since I wrote a survey of vacation cartoons, I was struck by the fact that this cartoon predated Tom and Jerry’s “Cruise Cat” – making it possibly the single instance where the Terry boys “scooped” H-B by beating them to a good storyline. In fact, a few gags (the rat guard on the hawser rope, the ship’s whistle bit) were swiped in modified form by the H-B version – MGM stealing from a Terrytoon! It’s interesting that Roquefort’s version of the rat guard gag comes off funnier than Jerry’s, or even a similar gag dating back to the earlier Pluto “Dog Watch”, with Roquefort being the only mouse with foresight enough to pack with him a welding torch AND welding glasses. I also particularly liked the bookends gag at the opening, with gullible Percy passing Roquefort right by. And the fake waves gag had a twist even Screwy Squirrel didn’t think or – turning the waves upside down, and having Percy go over the top of the porthole! Especially since the H-B cartoon was already short on plot ideas in the first place, having to rely upon a past clip from “Texas Tom” in the ship’s theater to kill time, I just can’t watch the H-B version anymore without feeling that I’m watching a “cheater”. Hail Roquefort!
Well, Joe did work at Terrytoons.
Joe worked at the studio in the mid 30’s very briefly before joining MGM
roquefort didn’t come to be until 1951
From the realize-a-day-later department:
The cruise ship has a deck gun? We’ll, okay.
The magazine was advertising a vacation destination… for mice?
This was 1951. Perhaps they thought they could get away with the deck gun gag as a relic from WWII, at which time its presence might have made more sense.
Maybe they were hoping the audience would have forgotten why they were on a (strangely deserted looking) ship in the first place.