Today’s Thanksgiving feature is Shamus Culhane’s first Woody Woodpecker! “Seville” marked the first appearance of a polished incarnation of Woody, designed by animator Emery Hawkins and layout artist Art Heinemann.
The premise of Puppet Show is that Oswald is a puppeteer who loses control of his puppet’s strings. Various live-action marionettes were used, comprising some very unfortunate cultural stereotypes, yet remains a rare filmed record of a 1936 puppet show.
For Halloween, a cartoon that makes us SCREAM: it marks the moment when the Walter Lantz cartoons take a precipitous turn for the worse, commencing a nosedive from which they never recovered.
The assignment that really accelerated the Lantz studio’s sophistication with musical sync was the animated introduction to “The King of Jazz”, a feature film that showcased the music of Paul Whiteman.
Today, we look at one of Dick Lundy’s best Walter Lantz cartoons – The immortal tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, as filtered through Woody Woodpecker.
In concluding these posts on the first-ever study of cartoon violence, a look at the original report reveals a surprise: the data shows the opposite of what is typically reported today.
This is the second of three posts on Alberta Siegel’s earliest research on cartoon violence. What began as a simple inquiry has evolved into something much more revealing and surprising.
No one who worked on Walter Lantz’ “Ace in the Hole” could possibly have anticipated what it would unleash when the cartoon became part of a controlled experiment to gauge children’s behavior.
This week’s film, “The Lumber Champ” starring Pooch the Pup, has a really great series of bizarre and outlandish gags. The mid-30s Lantz shorts are beautifully animated, but I really miss the zaniness of these earlier films.
Time for some boogie-woogie jungle rhythm! Shamus Culhane directs his crew – including Emery Hawkins, Les Kline, Paul Smith, Pat Matthews and Don Williams – in a jive-jumping’ Walter Lantz “Swing Symphony”.
