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\n\u201cI started drawing on the first day of the first grade. Basically, I cannot remember a time in school when I wasn\u2019t drawing. I went through all sorts of different stages, drawing all the things that kids draw: tanks and dinosaurs and monsters especially. But I wasn\u2019t very good. At around fifth grade, I hit upon the style that I\u2019ve kept to this day.<\/p>\n \u201cIn fifth grade, I realized life was hell when I had to sit in the corner for being unfairly accused of dropping an encyclopedia on the floor. Now, I\u2019ve doodled myself into a corner because I can\u2019t allow myself to do the same things to my kid that I\u2019ve written about. I no doubt will make mistakes, but I hope when my kid is an adult, he will be very forgiving. <\/p>\n \u201cDoing both the strip (Life in Hell<\/em>) and the series, I get a little tired sometimes but I\u2019m having a blast. This is just playing. I\u2019m doing what the teachers used to rap me on the knuckles for.\u201d<\/p>\n The cast of “Life In Hell”<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cI expected Bugs to stay popular for about 18 months. That\u2019s all. No one knew back then that cartoons as trailers with films would hang around for 25 years or more and that television would have such an insatiable need for children\u2019s programming. With Bugs, we wanted a wise guy rabbit, sure, but a peace-loving, friendly rabbit who only resorted to his famous tricks and acts of harassment when he was victimized by someone else. The other characters, too, were all carefully planned.<\/p>\n \u201cOnce a little girl came up to me, after she knew who I was, and said, \u2018Oh, you\u2019re the man who draws pictures of Bugs Bunny\u2019. Now, she didn\u2019t say I drew Bugs Bunny but that I drew pictures of Bugs Bunny. So, in her mind, Bugs was a real person that I drew pictures of and that\u2019s success for me.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat really annoys me with animation on television is the idea. In all these shows, everyone whether it\u2019s the Smurfs or whoever has to act as a large group to get anything done. In my cartoons, my characters always saved themselves or solved problems by themselves. That\u2019s the American spirit. To stand up for your right and \u2013 by yourself \u2013 win.\u201d<\/p>\n The Culhane Brothers<\/strong>. Never trust the information in books. In an interview with Mark Langer August 16th, 1990, Shamus Culhane vented about the biography of Walter Lantz written by Joe Adamson that had \u201cJimmie Culhane\u201d and \u201cShamus Culhane\u201d as two different people who were brothers. Shamus said, \u201cJoe Adamson had me with a brother, and he deftly divided my movie bibliography between one brother and the other. How nice. I do have a brother, but he\u2019s an electrical engineer. He never made movies. I mean that\u2019s not excusable for a guy to write a piece of sh*t like that, nor that Walter Lantz would allow it. He must not have read his own book, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDoing both the strip (Life in Hell) and the series, I\u2019m having a blast,” says Matt Groening. “I\u2019m doing what the teachers used to rap me on the knuckles for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":42686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[127,752,826],"class_list":["post-42673","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-animation-anecdotes","tag-chuck-jones","tag-matt-groening","tag-shamus-culhane"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42673","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42673"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42673\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42690,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42673\/revisions\/42690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42673"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42673"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42673"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/groening-simpson.jpg\")
\u201cBoth the Simpsons and the Andersons on Father Knows Best<\/em> live in a town called Springfield. I think that most of the humor about childhood mines the same territory over and over again. And I\u2019ve tried to write about stuff that\u2019s a little darker. I think we all have that in common. I mean, I\u2019m watching my child and you think of a baby\u2019s life as being idyllic but he\u2019s got two main moods: ecstatic joy and screaming unhappiness. I think that we tend to forget about the screaming.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Life_in_Hell_500.jpg\")
\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Quasimodo-101.jpg\")
Baxter on Quasi<\/strong>. In The Independent<\/em> newspaper for May 24th, 1996, animator James Baxter who was working on Disney\u2019s The Hunchback of Notre Dame<\/em> said, \u201cThere were concerns. We were taking on a pice of classic literature. The way the story goes is a bit more sympathetic. (Quasimodo) is not so much of a monster. I was trying to get more of a child-like quality. He\u2019s not deaf which he is in the book. He\u2019s more communicative than in previous incarnations. He\u2019s still kind of grotesque but he\u2019s a bit more aware of his own deformity.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Mickey\u2019s Voice<\/strong>. From the New York Post<\/em> November 18th, 1982, voice artist Jim MacDonald who was then seventy-six years old and still doing the voice of Mickey Mouse said that it wasn\u2019t that hard: \u201cGiving an hour or two every now and then to record his lines. That\u2019s all. He never had much dialogue. If you can get your voice into a falsetto you can pretty much do it. Problem is, if you do it too long, you go hoarse.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Joe Barbera\u2019s Advice to Animators<\/strong>. Producer Joe Barbera said in an interview in 1990 for World Features Syndicate: \u201cYou don\u2019t have to be the greatest artist in the world to be an animator. Keep drawing and keep practicing. Keep going to art school because even if you hate it, something is rubbing off. If you have an idea that\u2019s funny, do it, draw it and show it to somebody. Who would ever have bet on The Simpsons? The Simpsons<\/em> is a style you couldn\u2019t have given away ten years ago but today kids are looking for things like it that are kind of irreverent.\u201d<\/p>\n
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More Wisdom of Chuck Jones<\/strong>. From The Daily News, July 15, 1985, producer and animator Chuck Jones once again shared his thoughts: \u201cAnimators are like brain surgeons. You have to work well and work fast. An animator never sees his public and it\u2019s fun for me at a Six Flags amusement park to see the kids hugging my characters.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/bugs-bunny-200.jpg\")
\u201cYou see, cartoon characters are very much the same as characters in feature films. Like those charcters, they are appreciated for their actions, movements, personalities. It\u2019s Bugs\u2019 personality \u2013 and what a personality \u2013 that makes him Bugs, not the fact that we drew him as a funny rabbit.<\/p>\n
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