"THE SMOKER"

The Smoker:  "Hey sonny, here's twenty bucks! When the cigarettes come in, send a carton up to suite 316. And here's two bucks for you!"

Young Tobacconist:  "Gee whiz, mister! Thanks! Suite 316!"  (Then, to his friend after The SMOKER walks off...) "Billy, who is that guy? He orders a carton of cigarettes a day!"

Billy:  "Holy Cow! You don't know him!? He's a big-shot private detective! He's....'THE SMOKER!' "

ANNOUNCER:  "Yes, he's THE SMOKER, and a smoker knows what others can only guess at!"

  

Announcer (cont): "Through the tobacco mist he perceives truth and error...AND MURDER!" 

 
The Smoker:  "Yeah, I smoke a lot. It relaxes me, and things tend to happen when you smoke! Like the other day, for instance. I was sitting in my office, puffing away, when the phone rang...."

 
"It was a real cute girl, you could tell, and I knew she was classy because you could smell the expensive perfume right through the phone. She said she had a job for me, and that I should come down to her house in Beverly Hills."

  

"It was night when I got there. I didn't know what was going on,  but I figured I'd give the outside of the place the once over before knocking on the door.  I parked silently in the back and went through my routine. Wow! You coulda' fit my whole office in her kitchen! It looked OK, so I knocked."

 
"She answered as I was lighting up. Just another customer, I thought."


"Whoa! Let me revise that! NOT just another customer!!!! She was quite a woman, no doubt about it, about five-four, braided blonde hair, and with a body that said 'Wanna be my friend?'  Yeah, I definitely wanted to be her friend!" 

 

"She opened the door wide and gestured me in, but before I could take a step her face went pale. She seemed to be looking at something behind me."

 
"She backed up, trembling and saying "No...no! I won't tell anybody, I promise! Please...please...don't...."

"BAM! BAM, two shots rang out, and she crumpled to the floor!"

"I wheeled around to confront whatever it was, but before I could focus I took a heavy slam to the head and the next thing I knew I was out cold!"

"When I came to, maybe 15 minutes later, I found myself holding a warm gun. How did that get there? Not only that, but I was inside the house and it was dark.  I pulled myself up and groped along the furniture, looking for a light switch.  It didn't take long before I stumbled over something on the floor, and it wasn't furniture. It was something soft with braided hair. It was the lady from the doorway, covered in blood!"

"I let out a gasp and staggered backward! We'll never know what would have happened next because the next minute was all about the wail of police sirens, and the light from cop cars coming through the curtains."

 
"Maybe I shoulda' stayed there and explained everything...maybe... but there I was holding a warm gun next to a corpse, and somehow explaining didn't seem like a very good idea.  I pocketed the gun and headed for the back door.  That was when I got the second surprise of the evening...my car was gone!'

"My first thought was to run, then I noticed a fancy car with an open door and keys in the ignition. I didn't get it! Why would somebody take my old wreck and leave a car like this in its place? Who knows? No time to think! I got in and peeled out, before the cops knew what was happening!"    

"Did I say there were two surprises that evening?  Change it to three! On the seat beside beside me.....just sitting there was.....no, I think I'll save that part of the story for next time.  I'm getting hoarse and it's time to savor this wonderful menthol cigarette that I've been waving. Check in next week for another installment of ....THE SMOKER!"

 

SOME INTERESTING PICTURES!

I'm still wrestling with my new mac, trying to figure out how to get it to do what my old PC used to do. Boy, changing operating systems is traumatic! It's like going to live in a new country where you don't speak the language!  Every night I wrestle with some new mac problem, and I get so tense that it takes me a couple of hours to get to sleep.  Tonight I think I'll put all that aside and have some fun. Here's some pictures borrowed from other blogs that made me laugh out loud. Maybe they'll do the same for you!

Here's (above) a fine figure of a woman:  Bluto in drag from Bob Jacques' Popeye blog. What a pose! Why can't we buy cel set-ups like this? Click to enlarge.

 
In the best Popeyes the close-ups are always a special treat.  I'm awed by the unashamed cartooniness of this picture and the way it depicts Bluto's head as a tiny, ugly pimple  sitting atop a massive body. 

Bluto (above) makes his moves! It's profoundly disturbing and funny at the same time! Bob Jacques loves this stuff.  He even taught himself how to dance to the Popeye theme!  

 
How about some girlage, courtesy of Nico's blog.  Nico put himself to the task of enumerating the great cartoon women. He made some obvious choices like Red from the Tex Avery cartoons, but he also came up with some insightful, left-field picks like Olive Oyl (above). 

Nico says Beaky Buzzard's mom (above) was one of the greats, and maybe he's right! The Hungarian voice was inspired!

  
Of course Betty Boop's on the list!  How did Grimm ever think of giving her a head like a fly?

Nico also picked Jones' Ma Bear. Excellent choice! I wonder who did the voice? You don't think it was Stan Freberg, do you?

Man, she could turn on the charm (above)!

Here's (above and below) a couple of hillbilly pictures from Katie Rice's blog, "Funny Cute." This show needs to be on TV!

I'm getting all sorts of error messages so I can't provide links to these worthy sites, but most of you probably have them already.

 

SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS ABOUT ARCHITECTURE

Don't you hate wind traps?  I mean the buildings in big cities that catch the wind and throw it back at you, usually when it's cold outside and you're not dressed for the weather.  After a few minutes of walking past a wind trap you feel raw, like you've been sand-blasted.

I don't know any ordinary person who likes wind traps but amazingly, architects love them! How about this building by Frank Gehry? How'd you like to walk along the side of this building (above) on a windy day? Of course for wind trap-type buildings, every day is a windy day.  

I've never seen this building close up so I can't tell if it's accessible from the street. It looks like there's half a chance that the main door faces the river, not the front, forcing people from the street to walk around the bleak and arid concrete side. Probably most people come out of what looks like a wind trap parking lot on the right.  Imagine how cold the space in front of that lot gets when the wind blows off the river!

Maybe most people don't use the exterior doors and come into the structure from an escalator or an elevator in the parking lot.  Maybe it's just me, but that strikes me as sad. The space around a building is so electric and full of potential.  I think of a building as a big old shaggy dog of a thing that wants to be part of a community, not an isolated island that's imposed on it.

 On another point, I've never understood why architects don't make the exterior ground floor of their buildings more interesting. All you have to do is provide space for lots of little shops and let the merchants take care of the rest.  Of course you have to make sure the shops are visible from the street.  If it's a windy area you make an arcade. Visitors will come from all over to window shop along stores if they have the right "vibe."  Architects should be specialists in the art of "vibe."  

Here's (above) what every architect dreads...the cozy little street full of buildings conceived by by non-architects, and which come out of a specific cultural tradition.

 

 
On such a street you never know what you'll stumble on.  Every store reflects the unique character of the owner.

  
Changing the subject again, here's (above) a nice picture of St. Basil's Cathedral sitting in what used to be called Red Square, next to the Kremlin.  This has to be one of the most appealing buildings in the world. Legend has it that Ivan the Terrible had the eyes of the architects put out so they could never again build anything as beautiful.

  
Here's (above) the same building minus the snow.  What gorgeous color!

You don't see many pictures of the inside of St. Basil's.  Maybe that's because it's divided into eight chapels like the one above.  What an awesome room! The pattern looks like it was derived from delicate teacups and plates. It gives the room a fragile look, like a sneeze might bring the whole thing tumbling down.

  

WHY SOFTWARE SUCKS

Well, there's a long answer and a short answer.  The short answer is the picture of a programmer's desk, above.   If you were a programmer yourself, can you imagine entering this guy's room and asking for advice about how to make a program easier to use for old ladies?

This is the domain of the ubernerd.  The guy's obviously obsessed with computing, has no girlfriend, eats his meals (frozen TV dinners, Kraft macaroni, canned chili) in front of his computer, and has a huge collection of action figures. This guy, who rarely sees the light of day, sets the standard for other programmers.  A guy like this couldn't even imagine a project less interesting than making programs easy to use. 

 
At least that's what David Platt says in his recent book (above) on the subject. Platt's a programmer himself and he used to be an ubernerd. He only changed when he started designing sites for big companies who had a financial stake in being accessable to the public. If you don't want to buy the book, try his websites: "whysoftwaresucks.com" and "suckbusters!"

According to Platt, programmers who try to make programs easy to use have no status at all where they work. Real status comes from increasing control, from figuring out how to increase the number of options for things, from helping the user to customize, and from making toolbars and desktops look pretty. 

I'm not kidding about the pretty thing.  A long time ago, when I got my first computer (a gift from John K) I lost a couple of hours trying to find the start icon on the computer screen. Everybody told me it was on the lower left but I didn't see anything there. I wanted to scream. Finally a programmer friend came over my place and, with eyes rolled up to show his annoyance, used a keyboard command to scroll up.  From the bottom of the screen, below anything you could see, emerged a start icon.  Just like a submarine surfacing.  I was shocked! Dumbfounded, I asked why anyone would hide a thing like that and he said it was necessary to make the screen more beautiful! He actually admired the people who made it that way!

   

That brings us to another point, namely that a large number of hardcore programmers consider themselves to be Nietzscean supermen and social Darwinists. They see themselves as a superior race. People who have trouble with programs are the unfit, the weak, the chaff -- those who need to be weeded out, or at least not catered to.  

That's such an odd attitude.  Don't the programmers benefit from the simplicity of supermarkets where all the types of food are conveniently under the same roof? Don't they benefit from the convenience of hospitals, departments stores and large electronic stores? If they benefit from the work of others who made things simple for them, how can they be so hard-hearted when it's their turn to return the favor?

 

Sometimes I wonder how valuable these people really are to the companies who hire them. They create value, no doubt, but they also remove value. How many people held off from buying programs or devices because they didn't want to wade through thick and boring instruction manuals?  

 America on Line got to be big enough to buy Time Warner because they attempted to make the internet more easy to use.  There's clearly a dollar to be made by making things easy, but the ubernerds aren't interested in that dollar, in fact they have disdain for it. Are they really serving the best interest of their employers? 

ANOTHER BLACK & WHITE! STILL VAMPING WHILE I FIGURE OUT THE MAC!

"Hi folks! I, uh...thought you might like to meet a friend of mine!" 

"He's kinda' shy, but...I don't know....maybe we coax him out!"

"Wait a minute! There he is...hold on just a second....."

"And here he is!!! Folks, meet my pal Rudolph!!!!!! Say hi, Rudolph!"

"Folks, don't run away!  I know a lot of you hate puppets! Big mistake! Ya gotta give them a chance! They're the cutest little things! Here, watch this......"

"Hey Rudolph, do you have a message for our readers?"

"A hug!?? That's the message!?? Aw, that's Rudolph's message...a great big hug!"

"Well, here's back 'atcha little guy!"

"Another hug!? Awwwww!"

"I love you too, Rudolph!"

"Hey, why don't you keep everybody entertained while I get a cup of coffee?"

"Be right back! See ya in a minute (laughs)!!!"

Silence as Rudolph waits till Uncle Eddie is all the way out.

Puppet:  "Laugh now, Bucktooth, because you won't be able to laugh later on!  Your time is running out!"
Puppet: "The day will come when puppets will no longer have to tolerate human hands in their pants!"

 
Puppet:  "The day will come when the doors of my jungle laboratory will roll up, and a new race is unleashed upon the world....a race of zombie super puppets! Puppets who VILL TAKE OVER THE VERLD!"

Puppet:  "Yes, they will take over the Verld, and I, Rudolph, shall be their Supreme Master!!!!!! Prepare to bow down, vile worms! Your new Master is here!!!!!!"

Uncle Eddie (off screen):  "Everything going OK, Rudolph!?"

Uncle Eddie: "How'd it go!? They loved you right!??"

Uncle Eddie (Voice Over): "Of course they did!! Everybody loves Rudolph! He's so doggone lovable!"

He gives Rudolph some "noogies" on the head. 

Uncle Eddie:  "Gotta go! Bye everybody!!!!!! Say good-bye Rudolph!!!! Byyyyyeeeeee!!!!!!!"

Note:  Thanks to Mike for the cool puppet! And thanks to Ed Wood for the laboratory line!

WHY DID 60S FILMS LOOK SO BAD?

Something that needs to be explained is why color films of the early 60s were so badly photographed and composed.  Every shot in the films of this period seemed geared to producing good lobby cards.  Telling the story seemed to be secondary.

It's doubly puzzling because only a short time before, in the black and white era, Hollywood had no difficulty shooting dramatic scenes (above) in a convincing way. 

Sometimes I think Technicolor was to blame. The color was gorgeous but lighting it may have been so difficult that studios opted for simplistic set-ups.  Maybe wide screen was to blame. Maybe flattening long lenses. 

Another possiblity is that the minimalist aesthetic had set in and art directors simply thought that less was more. Look at the Hanna Barbera cartoons (above) from this period. Some of them are mind-numbingly bleak and arid, but I doubt that many people complained.  

Here's (above) what we would call today "TV lighting" and staging applied to a feature film. The characters are reduced to simple shapes. The background is generic, made a little dark in one spot to make Doris Day pop out.  The whole look is flat. Probably the technicolor was beautiful, but so what -- the composition and modelling are lifeless.

 
Here (above) human beings are reduced to cardboard cut-outs; just shapes and colors. It's scary because you get the feeling that the stories were simplified and streamlined to fit the clunky photography. 

Me, I prefer lighting that brings out the gritty humanity of the characters. I also like to see lots of extras, like in the scene below.  That doesn't work at all in animation, but it makes live action spring to life.  

THE MIDNIGHT SNACK

"I think I'll check my emails before I turn in.  Boy, the house is spooky this time of night." 

"I'll tell you something you probably didn't know.  Two of the people who owned this house in the past were murdered. No kidding! They were axed in this very room!"

"I know what you're thinking: 'Why did you buy a house where murders took place!?, ' and I just shrug. It was cheap; what can I say?  It's not so bad.  You hear weird sounds in here sometimes, but it's OK, you get used to it."

"Like that! Did you hear that!?  What do you think that was?"

 
"It sounded like crying behind the walls, but that couldn't be."

 
The story they tell about this place is that a husband decided to do away with his wife and hide her body in the space between the walls.  Those are the walls behind me.  He dragged her dead body up into the attic then dropped it into a space between the walls of the first floor. What he didn't know was that she wasn't really dead, and that she woke up inside the sealed-up wall." 

"Um....the  next part's pretty gnarly.  Are you sure you want me to tell you about it?""

 
"OK, you asked for it!  Well, they say she woke up in there and couldn't get out.  She couldn't scream because her throat had been damaged by the near-strangling.  The only way she could survive was to eat the occasional roach and twist the heads off rats.  The rats resisted and would savagely bite her hand as she strangled them."  

"After  a year in the dark eating rats,  she went insane.  All she could think about was vengeance, vengeance against the horrible man who had done this to her.  Imagine her in there, covered with mildew and bacteria, wearing a tattered dress soaked in her own waste products! Every once in a while she'd reach a point where she couldn't take it anymore,  and she'd howl and bang her head against the wall."

  

HOOOOOOWWWWLLLLL!!!!!!! BANG! BANG! BANG!

"Um...er, something like that. Don't worry it was probably just the wind."

"They say that once a year, she'd get so intolerably angry that she'd manage to crawl up out of the wall into the attic, then down into the house, where she would kill the occupant of this room. The first year she killed her husband, the second and third years  she killed the next guys who bought the house."  

"It never occurred to her to leave here. In her deranged state she got used to living in the wall. After she killed her latest victim, she would always tortuously drag herself back to the comfort and security of the rat-filled dark. The police could never figure out who the murderer was. It never occurred to them that it might be someone living in the wall, at least that's the story people around here tell."

HHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLL!!!!!!!!

"Good Grief! It's bad tonight!"

"You don't suppose that this is the night she'll crawl out, looking for vengeance?"

"They say there's an axe hidden behind a trunk in the attic that she uses to....."

"Naaaaw! That's just a story!  Don't think for one minute that I...."

HHHOOOOOOWWWWLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!       (Continued in the next post, below)

PART, THE SECOND

"I hear something moving behind the wall!  Whatever it is, it's climbing up to the rafters!"

"It stops, maybe to pick up the axe from it's place behind the trunk!"

"It's a woman,  a frail woman, painfully dragging herself across the floor, driven to lunatic exertion by a mad desire for revenge!  She reaches the trap door and lets herself down into the house!"

HOOOOOWWWLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Oh, my God....she's..... she's IN  THE ROOM! She's actually IN THE ROOM!!!"

"I can SMELL her TATTERED,  URINE-STAINED DRESS!"

"I hear the BREATH escaping from her TOOTHLESS, MILDEWED lips!! I feel WHITE-HOT RAGE!  I sense her BONEY, RAT-BITTEN FINGERS tightening around a DIRTY AXE HANDLE!  "

"It's now or never! I gotta get outta here!  I GOTTA GET OUTTA HERE!!!!!"

 
"Wait minute! If I go, I'll never get another place this cheap."

"Hmmmm.... the housing market being what it is......"

WHY EXISTENTIALISM SUCKS!

Yes, I really do think existentialism sucks, but that doesn't mean that I think existentialists are  stupid.  They're not. I considered myself one for years. They're simply victims of the shallow thinking that engulfed Western philosophy since the time of Rousseau.

BTW, that's Sartre in the left foreground above, and his colleague Simone de Beauvoir on the extreme right.  I love the way Sartre is so often portrayed in cafes, surrounded by beautiful women.  You have to admit that it's an appealing image.

 

 
I don't claim to have a deep understanding of the philosophy.  My admittedly limited understanding is that it says life is meaningless, and if it has no meaning, then we'd do best to give it meaning by choosing to value the things we love. Our choices may be objectively valueless,  but they mean something to us, so for us they have value.  Happiness consists of deliberately valuing lots of things.

  
Well, that's not a bad idea, particularly if life really is meaningless, but is it? It seems to me that all living things are born with a strong will to survive, eat and reproduce. In addition to that, we humans are born with a desire for friendship, comfort  and understanding.  That doesn't sound like meaninglessness to me.  Sartre seems to be describing the properties of rocks when he talks about meaninglessness.  As vulnerable living things, we are by definition "meaningful."

OK,  life is more meaningful if we value more things, but do we need a philosopher to tell us that?

Sartre's ideas about "bad faith" and "things in themselves" seem derived in spirit from Heiddeger,  who resisted logic and attempted to piece together a philosophy from unrelated enthusiasms he had.  Bertrand Russell refused to concede that existentialism was a real and consistent  philosophy, and I agree with him.  It's a literary creation.  It reflects a feeling of futility and a yearning for heroism that we all feel sometimes, and that's it's true value.  

 

 (Blogger just dropped my final picture so I'll have to struggle on without it)

What existentialism doesn't do is provide answers.  Sartre was a long-time communist in the era when Stalin was murdering people right and left.  During Mao's Cultural revolution, when millions were killed and sent to gulags for thoughts that no reasonable person would consider a crime, Sartre proudly wore a Mao button.  This from the reputed champion of freedom.  What was he thinking of?  

What I do like about Sartre is the nifty images he comes up with in his biography and plays.  "Nausea" contains an unforgettable description of the world as a gigantic warehouse filled with a black ocean where floating objects randomly, pointlessly,  bump each other in the darkness.  Wow!  Bleak, but beautiful!

VAMPING TIL I GET TO KNOW HOW MAC WORKS

"Hi, everybody!  It's just me, Uncle Eddie!"

"This isn't my room, it's my son's. He's a baseball guy and a philosophy major."

"He's a stoic, so the decoration in the room is pretty minimal.  I begged him to let me decorate it! I'm an artist...think of what I could have done with it! We could have been in the LA Times! In Architectural Digest!!! This could have been a big deal!!!!!"

"But like I said, he's a stoic.  He likes Heidegger too. I can't stand Heiddeger!  At least he's not an existentialist.  That's such a shallow philosophy."

 

"Good Grief!!! My hand turned white!!!!!"

"Hmmm, can't go around with white hands! You know what I'm gonna do about that?"

 
"Yes sir... I'll tell you what I'm gonna do about that....I got the solution right here.  Lemme see....yeah, here it is...right...here..........."

"SMELLY SHOE!!!! SMELLY SHOE!!!!"

Sniff! Sniff!

"Good Lord and Tarnation!!!!!!!!!!"

"That was gross! Sorry! I kid! I kid!"

UNCLE EDDIE'S DAD ANSWERS THE MAIL!

"Um...hello! It is I who am Uncle Eddie's father!  John's dad answers his mail sometimes, so my son  thought I should do this thigamajig, too!  Heh, heh. My son's a card, no?"

"Ok,  let's take a look at these letters....."

"What's all this Mac vs. PC stuff?"

 

"I hate to tell you but my kid's converting to being a Mac fan!  Mac isn't always faster or better...but Eddie says it's more fun."

 
"I don't know, I don't get all this computer stuff."

"It's good for pictures of girls, though!  Some of them have two-piece bathing suits!"

"OK, that's all for now!"

"No, wait a minute!!!"

"I forgot to say that, according to Eddie,  there's another Mac operating system called "Camino." He said Camino's  a Linux-based system that's easier to use than Safari.  He'll try that out after he posts this."

"Well that's it for real this time! Be seeing you!  Eddie, if you're reading this, be sure to take out the trash!  Your place was stinky last time I was there!  Um...bye!

Eddie says:  Whew! This was my first post on my new Mac. It took me FOREVER to do this,  but I guess it'll get easier.

Also, a plug for ace girl-artist Katie Rice's latest ebay auction!  I'm afraid to link to her site  because I'm probably just one electron away from exceeding my bandwidth here.  I didn't know how to reduce my pictures so I posted them all huge.  Anyway, to see Katie's pictures, just Google "FunnyCute!" 

WINDOWS XP BETTER THAN MAC LEOPARD!!!!!!

Sorry I don't have graphics to put up with this post. I can't figure out how to do that on my new  Mac.  With Windows you just go to your "My Pictures" and grab a picture. It's intuitive. With Mac....OK, I give up, where do you store your graphics? In the photo bin?

MAC SUCKS!  The default size of the Mac windows are thin and unattractive, and it's not clear how to widen them.  With windows you just pull on the sides.  The Mac welcoming screen should be called "the unwelcoming screen" because it's loaded to the gills with garish ads for Apple products, and the tiny sliver where you type in searches is lost in the clutter.  Making a picture larger or smaller on Windows is done with icons that visually describe your choices. I still haven't figured out how to do it on a Mac.

Confusing? Fear not! Mac has seen fit to answer questions on a free-for-all "forum" where you can mingle with random, confused users of all the Mac products and attempt to find something useful, if you don't die of exhaustion first. Dopey old Windows provides a manual, both physical and virtual, and it has an index.

My PC monitor had controls for brightness and saturation  that were on the front of the monitor, where everybody could see them.  You could use keyboard commands or just turn the knob. Ditto the volume knob on my PC speakers.  Not so with Mac. Mac even hides the on/off button.   

The set-up was alternately easy and confusing.  Mac wanted to know if I wanted to subscribe to .Mac but stupidly neglected to tell me what the heck .Mac was.  I was told I could get this mysterious, precious  thing on a free trial for 60 days, but I had to type in a password. The same password I use to log on?  Who knows?  It didn't say. I still don't know how to eject my installation CD.  With my PC I pushed a button next to the CD tray. 

So far almost every operation I've encountered, the ones that both Windows and Mac perform in a similar way, can be done more intuitively and with fewer steps on my PC.  Sorry, but there it is.  Probably I'll get used to the Mac system soon and will grow to prefer it like everybody else, but I want to record my first negative impressions now, before I forget them.

 

MY FAVORITE CARICATURIST

Here's some sketches by my very favorite caricaturist, Max Beerbohm. Beerbohm was part of Oscar Wilde's circle and is best known for his humorous essays. He's a terrific writer, very dry and understated: "A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses, were they not?" I imagine that I can see his influence on people like Noel Coward, Peter Cook, and Stephen Fry.

According to Wikipedia, Beerbohm's gifts bottomed out when he hit middle age. That's odd. You'd think a dry wit would hit a peak at that time of life. I wonder if he became a stay-at-home like Peter Cook, who's said to have spent his middle years in front of the TV set.

BTW, I may be off the net for a day or two. I just got a new Apple computer but I'm a Windows guy and it may take me a couple of days (or more) to get everything hooked up and running. I'll still continue to read comments, even if I'm unable to reply.

WERE SCRIPTS EVER USED IN ANIMATION'S GOLDEN AGE?

I'm not an animation historian and I've done no original research on the subject. If I had to make a guess I'd say some scripts must have been written because it's inconceivable that penny-pinching studio owners would have always, in all situations, resisted the common practice of live action, which was to use scripts. Also, just guessing again, I'd say that scripts couldn't have been very common. If they were, then where are they now? Why did books and articles written at the time (like "Art of Animation", above and below) emphasize story boards as the preferred way to write stories? Walt himself is on record in print and film saying that he didn't use scripts.

Bob Jaques says he owns a Fleischer script and Floyd Norman said he saw scripts being written while he worked at Disney's. Mike Barrier interviewed non-artist Bill Cottrell who wrote for Disney, and Mike put up Cottrell's script for "Cock Robin" on his site. Steve Worth was not impressed and says Cottrell's script was probably written after the storyboards were made, as a sort of handy synopsis or recording script. Mike disagrees and wants to throttle Steve, but Steve remains adamant. Here's an example of Cottrell's script, below:

It certainly looks like it was written after the story was already made and shot, at least as a Leica reel, but Mike says it contains things that weren't in the finished film, so it must have originated earlier. Maybe it was made from an early Leica reel. Gee, if a script this detailed and anal-retentive was written early, at the creative stage, it would certainly lead me to pity the poor animators whose creative input would have been zilch.

Steve says no scripts (meaning, I assume, creative scripts by non-artists that were more than just dictation) were written during animation's Golden Age. I winced when I heard that because there are exceptions to every rule, and I could imagine someone pulling out that exception from an attic somewhere. Mike says "Snow White" used scripts in addition to storyboards. Animation critic Charles Solomon says no scripts were used at Disney until "101 Dalmatians." I'm not an historian so I can't comment.

Myself, I think scripts are an absolutely terrible way to write animation, but I imagine that I can occasionally see the influence of non-artist writers in some classic films. "Lady and the Tramp" looked beautiful but the writing was full of cliches that are still used by non-artists today. "Aristocats" made after Walt's death, had an abundance of them. I simply can't imagine artists coming up with ideas as visually impaired as these. But maybe I'm wrong.

A BRUTAL, BRUTAL CARICATURE!!!!

Man, I should get the Mother Theresa Award for Taking IT on the Chin for Humanity. Why? Because nobody but a world-class altruist would ever share such a spectacularly withering and unflattering caricature of himself with the public! I do it to further the sacred cause of caricature, and to do penance for my sins.

The artist, of course, is John K. Click to enlarge.

BTW, I'm not offended and the reason is that the picture is so doggoned insightful. John's best caricatures always seem to ridicule nature even more than the person he's drawing. The picture shows someone who's full of self importance and doesn't seem to grasp that he's a shapeless bag of guts, doomed to live a pathetically short lifespan and turn to dust. The viewer laughs at the caricature then realizes that he himself is in the same boat.

ROD SCRIBNER & MANNY GOULD

Here's a picture of Clampett animators Rod Scribner and Manny Gould (click to enlarge). No doubt you've already seen it on Mike Barrier's site or, duped from Mike, on John K's blog. It's making the rounds, no doubt about it.

I reproduce it here out of gratitude to a friend who has a laser printer and who gave me a copy on the best possible glossy paper. The picture reproduces so big that it required four letter-sized prints to get the whole thing, which I promptly taped together to get one poster-size picture. During the week I'll find a nice frame for it.

I'm in heaven! A picture, beautifully composed, of the greatest funny animator and animation cartoonist who ever lived, Rod Scribner. It doesn't hurt to have ace funny man Manny Gould leaning over him. Gould's smile is radient. He must have been a real nice guy. Thanks, Mike, for putting this up!

http://www.michaelbarrier.com/

http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Home%20Page/RodScribnerAtWork.htm

While I'm at it, I should mention the "Pink Elephants" board (above) on Michael Sporn's site together with some Great Steig and Popeye (Below). And what about John K's recent post analysing the takes in "Tale of Two Kitties"? This is a great time to be on the net.

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/

http://www.johnkstuff.blogspot.com/

AAAAARRRGH!

"THE PRINCESS & THE GIANT"

(It's kind of clunky, but it's 4:15 AM and I've gotta get to bed)


Princess: "I LOVE TO TRY ON DRESSES!"

Princess: "Whaddaya think!? I bet you never saw me wear this dress before! It was expensive but I couldn't resist it! It's better than anything that slut Suzy wears, but she'll never admit it!

Princess: "Anyway, I'm really not in the mood to hear what Suzy thinks about anything, and what about Sonja and Jezebel!? Janie and Valery went shopping yesterday, and Sonja invites herself along...can you imagine that!?

Princess: "Of course Suzy's always hitting on Marvin and Marvin deserts me with the lame excuse that he had to go out of town on business! I told him to go ahead, see if I care...and he did! I said 'Fine, go! Good riddance! See if I care!' "

Princess: "Hey, I'm a princess! I could have Suzy's toes pulled off......Haha! Just kidding!"

Princess: "Why are men such jerks!? They always want just one thing!"

Princess: "Men should be like Giants! They never think of doing the nasty!"

Princess: "Anyway, Marvin can rot for all I care! If he came and begged me to take him back, what would I do? Nothing! The big zero! He can have Suzy if he wants her because I'm past all that!"

Princess: "I'm a princess! I'm rich! I could wear two new dresses every day if I wanted! What do I need men for!?

Princess: "Here, take these shoes!"

Princess: "Everybody thinks you find happiness by finding one special person that you share your life with, but I don't think that's how it works. Look at all the people who believe in that, they're all still looking, you know what I mean?"

Princess : "Here, take this scarf!"

Princess: "Me, I don't need the Marvins of the world. I'm a free spirit! I have a brain and a body and that's all anyone needs!"

Princess: "I greet life with a smile. I feel the sensation the of morning dew on my skin. I wait for Mr. Sun to come up and fill me with...with love energy!"

princess: "Get rid of this, will ya? Where's my other dress?"

Princess: I should write a book! I'd call it, 'Why I don't Need Marvin!" No wait... how about, 'Why Marvin Sucks!' "

Princess: "There's no perfect person who can make you whole, that's what I learned."

Princess: "If you wait for another person to fill you up, you could wait for years! A girl has to rely on herself! I want to be filled up now! Now! I say, 'Fill me up now!!!!!' Hmmm.... where's that blue dress?"

Princess: "It's all about karmic energy! The only way you can ever feel strong and secure is when you're giving it to others instead of wishing they would give it to you!" Give it to others, I say! Give it to others!!!!"

Princess: "Give that energy!!! Give!!!! GIVE!!!!!"

Giant wordlessly mouths, "Thank you, God! Thank you!"

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!



Continued below.....

THE GIANT AND THE PRINCESS (PART 2)

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

Giant: "Huh!???"

Princess: "Huh!?"



Princess: "Marvin!!!! Is that you!!? I thought you had left town!"



Prince: "I did, my darling..."



Prince: "...but I couldn't bear being away from you!"



Prince: "I couldn't think without you! I couldn't sleep!"

Princess: I-I know how you felt, Darling! I couldn't sleep either! I couldn't even keep down a cheese sandwich!"

Marvin: "Oh, I can't tell you how it feels to hear you say that!"

Prince: "M-Maybe it's time we made this permanent!"

Princess: "It always was permanent, Darling, it always was! Let's find a grotto somewhere and hold hands."

Princess: "Giant, clean this place up while we're gone will you? It's a mess!"

LET'S BRING BACK PSYCHOANALYSIS (REVISED)

I'm an admirer of Freud now but I wasn't always. I used to feel uncomfortable with ideas like childhood sexuality, the centrality of dreams, and the existence of the subconscious. I'm not aware that the fantasies and dreams I had when I was a kid had any influence on my adult life, and I just couldn't see any evidence for a subconscious. When I read that Freud was an advocate of cocaine, that tore it, I just dropped him from my thoughts. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I was too hasty.

When you think about it, psychoanalysis is an interesting idea. Modern methods of counseling nudge the patient toward normal behavior. They aim to produce a functioning citizen, and that's all. Psychoanalysis on the other hand, attempts to take the patient on a weird and fantastic journey through uncharted territory. The patient becomes Odysseus or Jason. He matures and deepens and sometimes even becomes heroic through conflict with demons from the netherworld. When the cure is arrived at the patient can look back on his trip as one of his great life experiences. The goal is not simply to create a citizen but to create a brave, powerful and wise human being.

Of course analysis is expensive and time-consuming and I imagine that a lot depends on the character of the analyst. Probably over time analysis became somewhat dry and formulistic. Maybe that's because society changed and shed its romantic roots. The analysts thought they were following Freud's rules because they stuck to what he said in print, but they neglected to add the flavor and feel of the romantic era that produced Freud. Some of the rules for psychoanalysis were unwritten because in Freud's time they were taken for granted. Things like the love of heroism and the passion for adventure were the common belief of everyone then living. You can't undertake analysis without a strong sense of this, yet it might not appear anywhere in the writing.

I know what you're thinking. All that journey stuff is fine but when it comes down to it, what really matters is, does it work? Was Freud right? My answer is that it probably doesn't work a lot of the time, but who cares? The journey is enriching all by itself, regardless of the outcome. You may come out of it a neurotic, but you'll be a more interesting neurotic.

All of us in the arts have something to be grateful to Freud for. He influenced all the arts, maybe literary novels and acting especially , but also painting, photography and even genre fiction like horror, sci-fi and thrillers. And what about politics? Freud's emphasis on sexuality and looking inward was one of the cornerstones of the 60s.

Freud is a gold mine of inspiration for writers. It must be a lot of fun to write scenes like: "I dreamed I was in a room with two tables, each with a vase of flowers and a clock. I tried to smell the flowers but I was overcome with a feeling of dread, as if the flowers didn't want me there, and the clocks began to tick, louder and louder . Outside I heard a car slam on its brakes and a loud crash. I tried to run to the window to see what happened, but..." And you have to admit that Freud-influenced screen plays provide much-needed work for Theramin operators.

It would be hard to over-estimate Freud's influence on the modern world. He took a lot that was over-the-top about 19th century literary romanticism and repackaged in the form of therapy for the 20th century. No small feat, that. Maybe Freud was the greatest of the Romantics.

It's a stretch, but you could argue that Freud was one of the people who saved the West from communism. Marxism was spreading like wildfire among intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century and it only hit a stone wall when it came up against Freud and the nationalist romantics. Freud's ideas weren't antagonistic to Marx, but they represented another systematic way of seeing the world, which existed completely outside of Marxism. After Freud, Marxism was not the "next new thing"...it was just one of a number of new things.