I'll start by stating the obvious, that Clampett's "Coal Black" was the best cartoon that Warners ever made. If you think about it, it also had the best soundtrack of any Warner cartoon. It weaved a lot of different black themes into a European orchestral matrix. It did so more successfully than Gershwin was able to do in "Porgy and Bess," and it told a story and wasn't just a sort of rock video. Thanks to Bob and Stalling and the gifted black musicians they worked with, the soundtrack holds together as a street smart, satisfying whole. It fit the jazz/swing sensibility like a glove.
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...and comedian and singer Leo Watson (above) as the voice of Prince Chawmin'....a great cast!
Now I have a question for you....what would have happened if Clampett hadn't left Warners in 1946? What if he and his unit, including Scribner and McKimson, had been able to stay together for a few more years? What if they had done more "Coal Black"-type cartoons? And here's an interesting question...what if they had given the whole Coal Black treatment to 40s nascent Rock 'n Rollers like Louis Jordan and his band?
Do you see what I'm getting at? What if Clampett's Warner style had allied itself to early Rock 'n Roll? It could have happened, and if it had...why, the whole medium of animation might have taken a different turn. Rock and Roll ripped through the era like a tornado and animation and cartooning might have hitched a ride with it. Animation and cartooning would have had a contemporary feel, and we would have been spared all the stupid animated films where we learn a life lesson at the end.
Imagine...animation that's street smart, that's for the whole family, not just kids, and that's genuinely entertaining with no condescension...the mind boggles.
Of course I'm dreaming. It could never really have happened. Soon after Clampett left Warners the film industry changed. The courts ruled that studios couldn't own theaters, the theaters deleted shorts in favor of double features, the Baby Boom took hold and people stayed home with their kids and watched TV...there was no money to do expensive shorts, and after a time, no venue.
Bob made a big sacrifice to do Coal Black. He had to do one, maybe even two cheater cartoons to pay for that film, and I imagine that couldn't have gone down well with the Warners management. He took risks to give us something new and exciting, but the world yawned and went in a different direction. Man, life is hard on creative people.
Here's a link to Coal Black. YouTube wouldn't let me embed it.
22 comments:
It really is incredible, isn't it?
An interesting post. One studio that was open to this material was Walter Lantz'. In the early forties he made a specialty of hiring famous black jazz musicians and built his cartoons around them. Some of the titles include:
Scrub Me Mama (with a Boogie Beat), Boogie Woogie Man, Jungle Jive, Cow Cow Boogie, Boogie Woogie Sioux, Syncopated Sioux, Voodoo in Harlem, and The Greatest Man in Asia.
The energy in these films is surprising. It wan't Scribner or Clampett, but it did work off that music.
I so friggin' WISH animation changed like that, instead of today.
Wow, to think of that! That certainly would be different!
I definitely love this cartoon, and I'm happy whenever I stumble upon it on the net. Hopefully if they release it, there won't be any frame overlapping (aka digital destruction).
Also, you can see the influence this cartoon had on John K: like when the littlest dwarf popped under their legs, and the "Rose Bud" part. I bet there's more, too!
Great post, Eddie. I like this cartoon a lot, though I personally prefer Clampett's other brilliant shorts, like The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Book Revue, Baby Bottleneck, and most of all The Big Snooze, since it had a really huge impact when I first saw as a kid many, many years ago. Thank God screen grabs of these shorts get posted everywhere, so young kids like me can study and learn from them.
Glad you're a big Louis Jordan fan like I am. His stuff was amazingly time transcending, funny, silly and just pure party music, like R and B in general was at the time. I've even heard him "rap" in a few of his tunes (go listen to "Beware" and the sequel "Look Out" for example. He talks almost at lightning speed in those old cuts!).
Great, analytical post.
Coal Black was innovative on so many creative levels that it was probably inevitable it would be misunderstood, ignored, maligned and dismissed by the kneejerk crowd - although their ranks have been steadily diminishing.
"So White", the red-hot Lena Horne/Dorothy Dandridge-like main character, was created at a time when you could count the portraits of sexy black women in cartoons on the fingers of one ear, with a barrel full of hen's teeth thrown in.
Michael: Yeah, the Swing Symphonies. They're great. What a pity Rock and Roll never got that treatment. I like the animation on the Seaside Woman video that McCartney did, and some of the Yellow Submarine animation, but those don't have the flair to change a whole industry the way I believe that Coal Black might have.
My favorite animation in Yellow Submarine was done for The Blue Meanie character. He was a great character, and had a great voice, too. Do you know who animated that?
Mike: What a pity that cartoon is so often discussed in terms of race. It's as if all the talk about Battleship Potempkin were about the politics of the film and not its innovative content.
Where one could imagine Eddie Cochrane, or Jerry Lee Lewis with animation like Coal Black, its difficult imagining them being done with the prevailing UPA style of the fifties. While there's a lot of inventive UPA work, it goes to show that its much more conservative than what the WB gang were doing in the 30's and 40's.
Okay.....*deep breath* Eddie, you have NO IDEA how much I have to say on this subject, nor how long I've been waiting for an opportunity to say it. But alas, it is 10:40pm and I apparently owe the world something tomorrow morning. So I'm making a note to myself ON PAPER to comment here. And believe me, when I'm done you'll be able to put butter on the scroll button and still feel your beard grow seven inches before it hits the bottom of the page. (I'd put it on my own blog....if I actually wanted people to see that shit....)
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll just be ingesting a 20-ton crate of Valium just to go to bed without thinking about this all night, thanks....
I love Coal Black, it gets a bad wrap for "racist" content. I don't feel that way at all (with the exception of one of two things) I think it's fun and wasn't done to mock anyone. I wish Disney would get the nads to release "Songs of the South" I'm sure if they had an proper introduction to explain it in context by Leonard Maltin or something everyone would be fine with it, except for news pundits respectively.
Hey maybe Criterion could release it?
Thomas: Wow! Good point. It IS more conservative!
Zoran: Sounds interesting!!!
Alberto: It's supposed to come out soon!
I wouldn't call this cartoon racist because of the caricaturing of the characters; as someone pointed out, it's simply exaggeration and indeed, most of us black people have full lips while most white people have thin lips.
What I DO find to be stereotypical (but not racist, they're two different things) are the gold teeth and the mispronunciation and misspelling of "Charming" as "Chawmin." I think the film would have worked as well without those unnecessary elements.
Some of you also need to understand that if black people have a "knee jerk" reaction to films like this, it's because there was a period where the only images of us were negative. Let's neither ignore nor forget history, folks.
Very interesting post! 'Coal Black' was the first Clampett cartoon I ever saw (only a year ago) and needless to say it changed my life forever. It is without a doubt my vote for greatest cartoon of all time, but I could be attaching everything it means to me to that. I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on it!
That's what they always say. Do you have a source?
Anon: Boy, the distinction between stereotypical and racist is right on. I like the gold tooth because it denotes flamboyance, and deliberate mispronunciations have been present in certain styles of black American music at least since the beginning of the recording era. I really think the style of music in this film requires it.
But maybe I'm being disingenuous. Intuitively I understand why the film might make you uneasy. I wish there was something that could be done about it short of altering the film or suppressing it, which would be unthinkable. I just can't think of anything. Fortunately time heals all wounds and eventually we'll all look at this film only as masterful entertainment.
Arguably the closest the WB cartoon studio came afterwards in terms of effectively featuring 'c music of its day was Freleng's "Three Little Bops". Though Shorty Rogers and Stan Freberg were both white, its close...
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x57z8c_the-three-little-bops_music
Seems WB did a few more of Coal Black-ish types of cartoons - this one a jive version of the 3 Bears:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zvsImlMi0o&feature=related
But yeah, that trend in American animation went pretty much AWOL.
R.Bakshi's AMERICAN POP does a take on 70's rock and roll, and there's the J.K. Rolling Stone inspired music video "Harlem Shuffle"
Today, Rap seems the most popular music associated with, or driving, Black-character animation. What might the major Rap based animations be? And are they generally family friendly (Tenacious D's "F__k HER GENTLY" ain't one of those!)?
Kurtwil: Thanks for the links! I've seen tem all, but it'll be fun to see them again!
Appropriate animation for hip hop!? Good question! If Coal Black had been allowed to be seen and have its influence, then animators would have had no trouble coming up with something that the public would like for that medium.
Okay - I'm finished school now, so here at long last is my tirade, as promised:
The great missing link in the exquisite dance between music and animation is: 40s drawing meets 70s music.
What do the two have in common?
Two things: CONSTRUCTION and EXAGGERATION.
For a brief period in the history of recorded music -roughly between the advent of 16-track recording and the rise of digital gear - rock'n'roll exploited it's unique position at the crossroads between art, technology and a badly shaken-up society with a restless, frustrated youth to create a kind of caricatured aural sculpture that doubled as flip social comment. Surreal content merged with hyperreal form, silly and serious became one and you could do pretty much anything with a record and get it released - especially if you were signed with, say, Island or Warner Bros. or Zappa's Straight/Bizarre Records.
Bob Ezrin, Ken Scott, Richard Perry, Tony Visconti, Frank Zappa, Todd Rundgren, Brian Eno, Chris Thomas.....this is just to name a few of the people who made this possible.
I will post some examples, but since I'm starting to make a salient point, I'll give myself some time to think more about it and do something else in the meantime....
Zoran: Fascinating, but I need to do some homework before I can follow the argument. It sounds like a good subject for an ebook or an epamphlet.
I also posted this on the now current blog (April 4, 2011) to give it a little more exposure to people who know more about this kind of music than I do.
I've always loved animation and drawing, but I've never heard of the coal black thing before.
Thanks for making it so much clear now.
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