We are fast approaching Friday the 13th. What more appropriate time to analyze both animation\u2019s most infamous number, and the various forms of superstition that have provided jinxes and hoodoos to many an animated star over the years.<\/p>\n
Perhaps one of the earliest known titles to deal with superstition would be Max Fleischer\u2019s, The Ouija Board<\/strong> (Bray Studios, Out of the Inkwell, 6\/4\/20). One of the very early Koko the Clown appearances where most of the action is done by rotoscope of Dave Fleischer in a clown suit, Koko is aided and abetted not only by \u201cUncle Max\u201d but by an assistant animator and a stereotypical black janitor, who has brought to the studio his ouija board, with which he and the assistant are engrossed in attempting to contact the spirit world. In a largely plotless episode, Max temporarily busies Koko with a haunted house of appearing and disappearing spirits, while Max too, scoffingly, takes his hand at the Ouija board\u2019s planchette (the little platform on which the user\u2019s fingertips are placed). Koko gets fed up with dodging the ghosts and, as usual, jumps off the drawing board. Sneaking under the planchette, Kok begins spelling out a message while nobody\u2019s hands are on the gadget! (Current frame rate of projection is so fast I can\u2019t really make out what his message reads – whatever it may be, it\u2019s enough to scare the janitor temporarily \u201cwhite\u201d, and send him into a shivering huddle in a corner, where he throws away his dice.) Koko tries to sneak away under a hat, but is discovered. The janitor spots him laughing on a shelf, and throws a bottle of ink at him, which shatters against the wall. Koko leaps from the blot off the shelf, but this time doesn\u2019t quite make it to the inkwell, landing instead on the front of Max\u2019s shirt, where he remains as a flattened ink stain in silhouette of himself.<\/p>\n