Columbia really made some bizarre cartoons! This week’s selection in no exception.
But first — in brief Thunderbean news:
This is “reviews” week at CCS, the College for Creative Studies, where I teach. It’s a crazy busy week where we look at every students work, in teams of professors. My brain in generally mush afterwords, but watching a Columbia cartoon and talking a little about it was a nice break.
I can’t wait to get some quality time over some days just concentrating on Thunderbean things. “Cartoons for Victory” is the title getting the most attention at the moment here as we get it closer to finish. We’ll be talking about that title more in the coming weeks, along with some other projects that are coming together.
The last of a big batch of special discs just went out today, and the next ones are getting prepared. I’m especially happy with this batch of stuff, and the next ones are pretty enjoyable too. We’ve launched two new ones today, but I’m not sure how much longer we’ll do them. We’ve also opened ‘The Vault’ of the older special discs for a week. It’s been a lot of fun doing them.
Now– this week’s cartoon!
The Crystal Gazer (1941) is a Columbia I hadn’t seen before scanning a print. It’s a spoof of live “Psychic” prediction shows, with Mel Blanc lending his voice (and some sound effects). The plot of cartoon consists of a show featuring “Famous Astrologist Professor Ja Ja Rajah”, who is almost the same character in design and demeanor that stars in the all time classic Columbia Cartoon The Cuckoo I.Q. My favorite summery of *that* cartoon comes from a review in the old Mindrot ‘zine that said a better title for it would be “Seven Minutes of Color Film”.
An audience member asks the question “Should I put Whipped Cream in My Potato Salad?” prompting the professor to go through a series of fairly uninspired convulsions until he gazes into a Crystal Ball, leading to a vision that is a much more interesting cartoon that it looked like it would be.
For some reason, his vision starts with him riding a camel in Egypt. They arrive at a tomb where mummies sing, play checkers, dance and make telephone calls. Mummies are hard to screw up, and this section of the cartoon makes the whole venture worth while, or at least makes it close to worth while. Please let me know if you agree or disagree!
Sadly, after that vision we return back to the original plot of the cartoon- but knowing Columbia it wouldn’t have been unlikely that they didn’t return to it.
All of that said, I’m glad Columbia kept making cartoons, even if they’re not on anyone’s favorite list. Heck, maybe this one is someone’s favorite.
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.
Well, I suppose watching “The Crystal Gazer” is preferable to eating potato salad with whipped cream. But only slightly.
I met animator Ed Henderson back in the mid-90s when he was running a stall at a Houston flea market, selling some of his extensive personal collection. Among original drawings from his Astrodome scoreboard cartoons and stuff from his days at Disney were a lot of model sheets and drawings from Screen Gems. I distinctly recall model sheets for Prof. Small and Mr. Tall and the buffalo from “Lo, the Poor Buffal” and a LOT of animation drawings from the Phantasies. This was unknown territory to me, so I was enthralled, moreso when I learned that he had worked several years there at the tail end of the studio’s existence. I kept coming back every weekend for months to buy what I could afford (not much, although I did end up with a big stack of drawings from “Snap Happy Traps”) but mostly to ask him about Screen Gems. At the time, all I had seen of Columbia’s cartoon output was what I could grab on Super-8 or 16mm, and Maltin’s “Of Mice and Magic” and bits from Shamus Culhane’s bio were the only available info. Ed’s recollections of the studio were, primarily, that it was extremely laid back and friendly, it paid moderate wages, and that staff were constantly coming and going because its reputation was ‘bottom rung’, a great place to start and get training and experiment, but not ideal for the driven or career-minded because the studio’s ‘also-ran’ reputation could potentially trail after you. This seems to be borne out by Art Davis’s reception and general treatment at Warner Bros. where seemingly even an Academy Award nomination counted for less than having been a “Screen Gems director”. In brief, it was a studio where there was never an opportunity for anything to coalesce, although budgets were actually improving at the end. Ed claimed at the time that he was either writing a book, or considering writing a book, in which he would cover his days at the studio that Culhane memorably referred to as “that catafalque of mediocrity”, but I don’t know if anything ever came of it. Ed died in 2020 and I’m glad to have known him.
The presence of Mel Blanc is chiefly what makes this cartoon work, if it works at all. He lends a sense of urgency and purpose to what otherwise is a vague and meandering premise. This one seems like it was written by someone who was hard up for ideas. And while I didn’t laugh out loud at any moment there is some clever material, especially in the tomb of the mummies. A cartoon like this proves that gags alone are not enough–a cartoon, or any film, needs to feature characters we care about getting themselves into and/or out of a predicament that has some grounding, however far-fetched, in reality. A cartoon can’t simply “be funny”–there has to be a driving force that propels it into humorous situations.
Thanks for this post! I had never seen this cartoon before.
Yeah, “Gazer” is new to me also.
The biggest laugh I got was when I mistakenly thought The Great Sphinx was vaping when it first appeared.
I’ll show myself out…
I hope for a future entry on The Mad Hatter by the same team (I think)…
Sid Marcus directed a number of films with this little “Van Goon” character in the early 40s. All of them are dreadfully plodding. Even Mel Blanc’s voicework doesn’t make them any more entertaining. The cinematography and action both fall flat and most of their runtime is spent sitting around, talking ‘funny’ dialogue with an occasional slap.
This brief period after Scrappy died but before Tashlin came around has a lot of unremarkable films, both color and monochrome. The best ones of the lot weren’t even made at the studio; Iwerks farmed out a number of good ones. Still, Ben Harrison did a few gems, and Marcus got a lot of winners before 1939, too. I wonder what caused the sudden shift in direction?
I think it was likely due to Charles Mintz sold his studio to Columbia because he was indebted to them and his death later. Since by late 1938 the Color Rhapsodies stopped credited him, while Scrappy and Krazy Kat still did, they soon stop being produced and were replaced by Fables and Phantasies.
After Mintz’s death, studio manager Jimmy Bronis briefly became the new producer and then George Winkler took over, and probably neither of them could make the studio run the way Mintz did. It was also said that Winkler ushered in a brief period of intra-studio suspicion and competition, pitting the directors against one another in a heavy-handed effort to cut costs. Despite Sid Marcus, Art Davis, Ub Iwerks, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould still achieved to create a few gems, it can be seen that most of the work they did were half-baked.
It’s perhaps significant that there’s no story credit for this cartoon. It looks like they couldn’t quite make up their mind between a gag cartoon on the seer, and a gag cartoon on Ancient Egypt. Alas, another Screen Gems misfire; decent character animation can’t rescue an incoherent plot.
To be honest, Screen Gems had already replaced story credit with director credit during started on their Color Rhapsodies. This is one of the earliest B&W cartoon that they used director credit with no story credit, though. The other pre-Tashlin Screen Gems B&W cartoon that did this was the 1941 Fable, “Playing the Pied Piper” (Lou Lilly, dir.)
Who were the animators on this cartoon? The style of the actual animation is quite odd.
The animators during this period is really a mystery and I wish to see more come to light, too. I think Art Davis probably did some animation here, though. It seemed that during this period, not only did he do animation for his own unit, but for Marcus’ too.
Something that’s always puzzled me is the vast difference between the Columbia live action shorts and their cartoons, in both quality and popularity.
Not only were the Columbia two-reelers incredibly popular due mainly to the presence of the Three Stooges, but they also had a very strong lineup of silent era slapstick “old pros,” including Andy Clyde, Harry Langdon, Vernon Dent, Monty Collins (as both actor and writer), Charley Chase (directing some of the best Stooges shorts), and from 1939 to 1941, the great Buster Keaton.
So why was this shorts unit such a roaring success, continuing right on into the Stooges revival on local tv stations all over the country starting in the late 50’s, while their little “mouse factory” was never anything more than an also-ran? Does anyone have any ideas on how or why this situation came about?
Maybe the wily Harry Cohn was using it as a tax writeoff? Just a guess…
Enjoyed this cartoon very much. Loved the satire and the contemporary references. For me, a cartoon made in the 1940s has to be pretty bad not be enjoyable.
Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT “Should I put Whipped Cream in My Potato Salad? Here’s the opening of the reply:
Yes — but only in certain styles of potato salad.
A spoonful or two of whipped cream can make a potato salad lighter, smoother, and slightly sweeter. It was especially common in some mid-century American recipes, particularly “picnic” or “church cookbook” potato salads from the 1950s–1970s. The whipped cream softens the sharpness of mayonnaise and mustard and gives the dressing a fluffy texture.