Part Two: The Golden Age of Animation
As much as we on the side of the water would like to think our cartoons mattered at this time, they did not. Nobody gave a damn about Bubble and Squeak, or Renard the Fox, or any other non-American animation. Like it or not, America was where it was at. Disney was the gold standard by the mid to late 1930s, and while they had their challengers and contemporaries, all of them were American. Although it would be fair to say that animation was born in Europe, or maybe that it was conceived there, it walked, talked and found its fortune in the land of the free, and all the best cartoons, for decades after, would be associated with and come from the United States.
Giants of the Golden Age: Drawing the Future of Animation
As has been related already, the king of cartoons by the late 1930s was Disney, who had few competitors. Max Fleischer had done all right, but really only had the Superman cartoons and Popeye and Betty Boop in his stable, while Terrytoons was, well, just not very good. But if you’re of my generation, and grew up sitting on the floor starting up at the television rather than going to the movies, it won’t really be Uncle Walt’s creations you’ll remember dancing, flying, running and chasing across the small screen. For most of us, our first recollection of cartoons on the telly was a bright colourful shield, and the sound almost of an elastic band being stretched back before the familiar music began, and Looney Tunes exploded onto our screens. The man behind that, the man who would become, if not the king of cartoons then certainly its crown prince, and who would dare to take on the might of Disney, and successfully, was this man.
Leon Schlesinger (1884 - 1949) was a movie producer who ran the gargantuan Warner Bros. studios, and truth to tell, the movie giant wasn’t really looking to get into the cartoon business as such. Cartoons didn’t sell. But they wanted to combat Disney’s monopoly on “shorts”. A “short” was a cartoon or cartoons that would run before a movie, essentially either “warming the audience up” for the main feature or, as was often the case, allowing latecomers not to miss the movie, as they could hear the sounds of the cartoon and knew the main film was next. I have fond memories myself of listening outside as my mother paid for the tickets and the booming roar of an anvil falling on Tom the cat, or the “Meep-meep!” of the Roadrunner, while the pounding frenetic music that accompanied these cartoons thundered out from behind the swinging cinema doors, and grabbing her coat in an effort to hurry her up, whining “Ma! We’re missing the cartoons!” For kids of my age (seven, eight maybe) often the cartoons were what we went to see more than the actual movie.
In 1929 Disney had cornered this market, and so had managed to secure a free shop window for their creations. The kids would love them, and so would the adults, as the cartoons kept the kids quiet. There was nothing quite so breath-taking for a child of my age than to see the desert stretching away in the distance as Roadrunner streaked away down the dusty trail, seeming to go so much farther than he could on the TV, or Bugs Bunny tunnelling under the ground to come up in a Florida that seemed huge compared to the one we usually saw back home. Everything was bigger, louder and even seemed brighter, probably due to the darkness in the cinema. It was quite an experience.
But before those characters could claim their place on the silver screen, and push Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck off, Warners had to have them created, and for this they hired Leon Schlesinger, initially to help promote their music, having just acquired Brunswick Records. Schlesinger hired two ex-Disney animators, Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman, and their first production was the decidedly-racist-looking Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid.
Bosko obviously owes some of his look to Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, on whom the two had worked for Disney, as previously featured, and also to Disney’s
Alice’s Adventures as well as Fleishcher’s
Out of the Inkwell. Using a combination of live-action and animated drawing, Ising is shown bereft of ideas until he creates the character of Bosko, who then shows him what he can do. Look, this is 1929 so you would have to forgive them for what we would today decry as utterly abominable racism, but even so: the character talks in very much a black man’s voice, calls Ising “boss” and is essentially put through his paces by his “massa”. Not only that, he, Bosko, also imitates in a very unflattering manner a Chinese character. It’s quite disturbing, but as I say, it was a different time.
What’s even more unsettling is that the voice of Bosko, Carman Griffin “Max” Maxwell, was not even black, which makes the put-on-black-boy voice even more insulting, but again, as I say, product of its time I guess. Leaving all that aside though, you can see where Ising and Harman brought what they had learned during their time at Disney, particularly working on Oswald, to their new creation. Bosko’s tongue unravels and he winches it back in by taking off his hat and turning a hair on his head, the piano notes ripple like water, a duff key is taken out and replaced in the bass register, and the piano stool on which he sits gallops like a small dog towards the piano. All very surreal, all very pioneering Disney ideas that would become standard in cartoons as they developed.
Bosko’s body elongates to impossible lengths, his head in fact stretching so far that his neck becomes a spring and he is unable for some time to get it back on his shoulders. In perhaps yet another disturbing scene, Bosko is “destroyed” by his creator as he is forcibly sucked back into the pen out of which he was created, but I guess it’s all right, as he cheekily pops up out of the ink bottle and waves everyone goodbye, also blowing a raspberry at his creator, which maybe gives some small amount of power to the character (the black man?) and which may be - though I think not - the first instance of a character being rude to the artist who drew him, again something in particular that Warners would come back to occasionally.
Schlesinger was so impressed with Bosko that he hired the pair, and they went on to create the first ever cartoon for Warners, which would star Bosko (the original was never shown in cinemas) in his first adventure,
Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930). Longer than the original appearance of Bosko by a good three minutes, the short features more of the non-logic of cartoons, as the shower sprays water into the bathtub but the water level remains the same, and even the water which leaks out in drops over the side just vanishes. Nothing gets flooded. Bokso then starts playing the water as it comes out of the shower head in four straight lines, like a harp, then hops out of the tub, which itself begins to dance around with a toilet roll. No seriously. Other weird, cartoony things happen during the short, like Bosko redirecting the flow out the window and it becoming like a slide he can ride to the outside, his car sometimes driving and sometimes walking, and a goat who eats his flowers performing impossible contortions.
To presumably cater to the female audience members, Bosko is given a girlfriend, so strongly modelled on Minnie Mouse that Walt must have considered suing. I mean, she even has the big spotted ribbon in her hair! The animation follows the Disney model again when, unimpressed by Bosko’s rendition of "Tip-toe Through the Tulips" she pours water into his horn (ooer!) and he starts blowing bubbles from it, the music soundtrack turning smoothly to “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”, which she seems to appreciate more. Honey then uses the bubbles to dance on and eventually float to the ground. I must say, it’s surprising how that got by the censor, as she sways and gyrates and her knickers fall down to her ankles. I mean, there’s nothing there, just black flesh, but still, for the thirties I would have thought quite suggestive. Still, Betty Boop was on the horizon, so I guess in terms of the new decade, maybe not so
risque?
I would have to be critical here and say firstly, the title is s
hite, as only the first thirty seconds to a minute focus on the bathtub, and also, secondly, once the two go off in Bosko’s car, the plot, such as it is, mirrors so closely Oswald’s
Trolley Troubles that it has to be considered a blatant rip-off of that cartoon. Whether Ising and Harman did this on purpose to give Walt the finger, since he had lost the copyright for that character in 1928, or it was just easier to use what they had already created I don’t know, but this is poor in terms of originality. Honey’s frantic “save me!” arm waving mirrors the later gestures of Fleischer’s Olive Oyl, Popeye’s girlfriend. Again, whether the rival animator watched this cartoon and took the idea for his female character or not I don’t know, but if not, it’s an interesting coincidence. Minnie did no such thing in
Plane Crazy.
Like
Trolley Troubles they both end up in the water, though I do have to admit the car seems to have turned into a bathtub now. The scene as they race around and down a mountain reminds me of that Chinese production,
Princess Iron Fan, though I might be misremembering; been a while since I updated this journal. At the end of the cartoon we see it is the first in what will become a series of well-loved cartoons, and a phrase that will be remembered by all kids from the 1970s and 1980s: a
Looney Tune. Bosko also uses for the first time the farewell phrase which will be taken up by a later creation of the studio, Porky Pig, when he grins “That’s all folks!” (Without the stammer, at this point).
Bosko was a hit, and would go on to star in almost forty adventures, transferring in the 1950s to the new medium of television. There’s a lot of apologist nonsense I read about him being the “most balanced portrayal of blacks in cartoons to that point”, but I don’t buy it. They even try to say his race was “ambiguous.” Absolutely. So those exaggerated lips, the squat nose, the deep southern voice, the usage of words like “sho’nuff”, “them people” and “dat sho’ is mighty fine” are all just coincidental, are they? No intention to make this character look and sound like a black man? If so, why not make him look more like, well, anything? Alien even, or an elf? Because people would not respond to, identify with/against and most importantly, laugh AT (not with) such a figure. Do me a favour. Unintentional my arse.
However, intentionally racist or not, it didn’t matter, as mostly it was “white folks” who went to - or were allowed into - cinemas, and their needs and requirements must always be first and foremost attended to and catered to, so Bosko went on to great success, though he did undergo something of a revamp, perhaps oddly being made more clearly black, so you know, shrug. Warner would not reap the success of the character though, as after an argument over budget restrictions Ising and Harman quit and took the copyright to Bosko with them, moving to MGM Studios, where they produced the rest of their cartoons until being fired from there in 1938. Left with no characters and no animators, Schlesinger hired Earl Duvall, who created Buddy, the only character Schlesinger had for his now-vacant cartoon spots.
There’s no question in my mind that this guy bears a startling resemblance to a certain donut-holding statue in Springfield, and Lard Lad must have been based on him. Buddy would take again the idea of a small boy and use it to flesh out the character, giving him the sort of adventures Bosko would have on “the other side”, i.e., at MGM. Unfortunately, whether it was down to the animators or the scriptwriters (I don’t know if the work was shared or if the cartoonists also wrote the cartoons, though I suspect the latter) the stories were dull and lifeless, nothing like Bosko’s crazy, logic-defying world, and they did poorly. They were, after all, as Bosko had been, supposed to be merely vehicles to sell sheet music and phonograph recordings of the music in the Brunswick stable, so Buddy’s cartoons concentrated more on the hard sell of the music and dispensed with the zany antics. As a result, he was never popular and though the second of the
Looney Tunes characters, he is not remembered today and his last cartoon was screened in 1935, two years before Disney would change the game totally with
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Meanwhile, over at MGM the two rebel animators were doing just fine with their Bosko cartoons, the character far more popular than Buddy ever would be, though they were of course unable to promote him as a Looney Tunes character, as Warner owned the rights to the name. They got around this by calling their franchise
Happy Harmonies (so close to later Warners’
Merrie Melodies that you’d imagine they knew) and under this banner Bosko ran for four years and over thirty-five films, though not very many of them featured Bosko as they created new characters to fill in the franchise. This seems to have been the first attempt by the new studio (in terms of animation) to introduce anthropomorphic animals into cartoons. Yes, there was a goat in Bosko’s first feature, but it wasn’t human-like. It acted like a goat, stood on four legs and chewed grass, did not talk, and apart from evincing an almost human irritation with the little guy, was like any other goat.
This series features frogs, ducks, crows, pigs, chickens, some performing as the animals they are, some sitting at tables, using hammers etc. The idea of anthropomorphic animals had of course already been born with Disney and Mickey Mouse, but these may have been the first colour cartoons of that nature. Some were made in what was called “two-strip technicolor” and other, later ones in three-strip. As the process is a little long-winded and hard to explain, and as I am a lazy bastard, I’ve copied and pasted the relevant descriptions of these two processes from Wiki.