As Stanley Kubrick’s directorial career progressed the argument could be made that he had studied some Walter Lantz cartoons. Not just any cartoons, but specifically the brutal ones directed by Shamus Culhane.
There it was, a hidden treasure inside of a cartoon explosion, a desperate few seconds of avant-garde filmmaking that played to millions of post-war moviegoers and then to Baby Boomers…
Walt Disney liked to say that it all started with a Mouse, but there exists a Bizarro universe where the story goes differently. Here is the flip-side of that Mickey origin tale, where Walter Lantz is the guy at the table left holding all the chips.
Today, we’ll look into director Dick Lundy’s first Woody Woodpecker cartoon – with animation by Emery Hawkins, Paul Smith, Bernard Garbutt and Sidney Pillet.
The Lantz studio provided many artists the opportunity to develop their expertise, even if they might later have done their most notable work elsewhere. In the case of painter Ed…
For this week, I decided to turn my column over my colleague Chris Buchman – whom I wrote about here in May 2014. With Chris, Thunderbean produced and released “A…
This was a gruesome incident that gets whispered about in the annals of Golden Age animation, so perhaps it is time to point a forensic lens at that devastating paperclip…
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first of a new series of columns that will appear here twice a month (on Saturdays) that will delve into the archives of Walter Lantz…
Today, the Lantz studio introduces a new comic foil for Woody Woodpecker! On paper, the concept for this cartoon seems thin, but director Shamus Culhane provides one of the finest…
“Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha! Ha-ha-ha-HA-ha! That’s the Woody Woodpecker Song…” In 1947, musicians George Tibbles and Ramey Idriss played Walter Lantz their new song about his famous manic woodpecker over the phone. Tibbles…
