MY HERO, BOB CLAMPETT

I just re-read John K's two excellent posts about "Kitty Kornered" and they left me so excited that I feel I have to get invoved and say something about Clampett too. The problem is that I am sooooo sleepy! As soon as I dot the last "i" I'm outta here. Forget spell check! Forget making sense!

Anyway that's the young Clampett above. That was the first of his three major "looks."

Here's (above) the second. It's the Gabe Swaar Clampett, the 50s Madison Avenue ad man Clampett. Man, I'd kill to have a pair of glasses like that!

Here's (above) the Clampett I knew, the Roy Orbinson Clampett. That's Daws Butler standing beside him.


Here's (above) a publicity shot showing Clampett with Cecil looking very, very phallic behind him. Is that Beany looking like a wino on the ground? Maybe the mop is a reference to the "Rag Mopp" song that Cecil used to sing.

Bob was a hero for all cartoonists because he believed in funny cartoons. In his best cartoons he even went beyond funny, making cartoons that were uniquely cinematic and musical without sacrificing any of the humor. Look at "Coal Black", "Great Piggy Bank Robbery" "Kitty Kornered" and "Book Review". These are visceral films. They're musical even with the sound turned low. They're pure cinema. If you liked Eisenstein's "Odessa Steps" sequence you'll have no trouble appreciating Clampett.

Clampett seems to have been the only Warners director who genuinely liked music. Bob had a collection of Boogie Woogie, swing, jazz and classical and it was intended for use. You get the feeling the other directors considered music to be an afterthought. They worked with Carl Stalling (pictured above) and the Warner Brothers Orchestra... and they wasted them!!!!! Leon was even willing to foot the bill for occasional visiting musicians like Ellington's "Jump for Joy" musicians who worked on Coal Black. Only Clampett took advantage of the situation.

I know, some body's saying "What about 'What's opera Doc' ? Jones and Freleng took plenty of advantage!" No they didn't, not really. I love Jones' opera films but they were almost literal interpretations of the music they were associated with. Clampett egged Stalling on to blend musical styles in the same cartoon. Look at Coal Black where Boogie Woogie blends with Mozart. Even rhythmic dialogue voices and effects become part of the music.

But Bob went even further than that. He paced the films themselves as if they were music! You know the feeling you get when you watch Eisenstein's "Odessa steps" sequence? You feel like you're hearing music even though the film is silent. Bob could do that with funny cartoons! He had a feeling for film, something like the way Tito Puente had a feel for orchestral arrangements. It put his best work miles ahead of the competition!

Bob liked broad action and I'm always afraid that detractors will say about him, "Sure, he was good, if you like big takes and stretched bodies, but cartoons should be about more than that. You get tired of that stuff after a while." My answer is "yes, you would get tired of it and that's why there's tons of subtle action in most of Clampett's cartoons!"

But let's suppose Bob was mistaken and put in too much over-the-top stuff. For Pete's Sake, don't let your distaste for that blind you to the million other innovations in the films. Don't hate Odessa Steps just because you hate to see a baby get hurt!

As a closing shot I thought I'd put up a picture (above) of Bob with Daws Butler and Stan Freberg. Poor Bob! The shutter probably got him in one of those wincing "inbetween" poses I was talking about a couple of posts ago. It's not a flattering picture and Bob was probably crest-fallen when he saw it, but it's funny that he got caught that way. I like to think that Bob laughed when he saw it, even if he had to threaten the photographer with death a minute later.

Now beautiful, beautiful sleep....!

CLAMPETT AND THE ART OF THE INBETWEEN

GREETINGS CARTOON FANS!

Thanks to friends John & Kali I'm able to post a real discussion of animation with lots of examples and not just a couple of stolen frame grabs. I even have a link to a film clip at the bottom! I feel so adult!

OK, enough gushing! Let's get down to it!

This is Porky on the doorstep from Clampett's "Kitty Cornered." This was the first Clampett I ever saw and when it came on my jaw practically dropped to the floor!
I was used to pose to pose animation where the inbetweens were just technical necessities. I didn't question that, I just assumed that animation involved a certain amount of tedium and there was no way of getting around it. Now here, in front of me, was a whole different way of animating! Here the animator (Rod Scribner) did his own inbetweens. I was shocked! It not only worked but it was fall-off-the-seat funny!


Most of the poses on this post are inbetweens. I had to leave out a lot to conserve bandwidth, but you can see that Scribner is cartooning like crazy, throwing in every funny idea that could fit. The pose above with raised arms reminds me of the old Keystone Cops poses that you used to see in newspaper comics. I love how Porky's fat little body compresses here. Look how delightfully seedy his eyes are!


This (above) is the kind of toothy, squinty expression you only get in inbetweens. Inbetweens should look like inbetweens. They should show all the transitory little emotions between the major emotions. Even a sad person will have a happy inbetween or two and visa versa.


Here (above) Porky struggles to get the word out. Even if he didn't stutter he'd have to struggle. We humans communicate with grunts and whistles from our lips and voice box and getting it all out past the mushy part of our muzzle requires an effort!
"OH BOB! YOU WERE SO GREAT! HOW DID YOU AND SCRIBNER THINK OF STUFF LIKE THAT!!!???" Oh...uh... pardon. I lost it for a moment.



So here's the pig again! He pushes out toward camera with his mean little baby face...


Then he antics back, looking very much like a human all of a sudden (as all animals should periodically), then...

BAM! A really explosive thrust outward (above) with big, dilated eyes and killer arm positions! Those arms work great with the bowed legs. Scribner was a great cartoonist as well as a great animator! What a dynamite combination!

Oops! He withdraws into a little compressed ball of peevish anger. Somehow we become aware of the nightshirt again.

His muzzle (above) prepares for another outburst. The cheek muscles pucker and stretch in preparation for forcing the words out.


A big antic (above) allows us to see how large the cranium is. The arms fly up as if to do another Keystone Cops pose but instead...


...instead he grabs the air like a baby and diddles it! And wow, look at the far away stare in Porky's eyes!

Is the anger dissipating? Sort of! Here's (above) another classic inbetween face showing the tired, squinting eyes again. Emotion is very tiring for us and we have to go into near sleep between emotions sometimes, even when we're excited and in the middle of broad action.

The world of inbetweens is a strange, surreal world where characters' real emotions hold sway. It's the world that would exist if all of us were prevented from taking stock poses to impress other people. It's the world of the ego rather than the super-ego. It's a place where people flash angry, infantile, ridiculing, lecherous, acquisitive, stupid poses at each other. In a funny studio the inbetweener would be a respected professional possessing great and mysterious secrets about the human condition.

Back to the cartoon: Porky snaps out of his reverie into this hilarious Joe Besser fists-up-to-the-cheeks pose. I like hands that hug the face. After all, the face is the master, the controller. What could be more natural than to have its minions nearby?

Gee, I must sound crazy talking this way. Anyway, it's a tribute to Bob Clampett that his cartoons stimulate discussion like this. I'm a huge fan of Jones and Avery but their animation is pretty straight-forward and not as nuanced as what Clampett and Scribner did.

Here's (below) the Porky on the step animation!
CLICK ON THIS TO SEE THE FIRST EVER OFFICIAL CARTOON CLIP!!!




OK, that's enough for one day! Return to your work-a-day world secure in the knowledge that you're a new man (yes, even if you were a woman before)! You've been up to the mountain! You've been refreshed at the fountain of Clampett!

WHY CARTOONS FAVOR ZOMBIE AUDIENCES

It's amazing how many vintage cartoons contain zombie audience scenes like this one (above) from Clampett's "Henpecked Duck."
Look at the audience behind Daffy. The characters in the background painting are hazy and ghost-like, with blank faces as if they were just bussed in from Hell.

Here the audience has acquired some definition but they're still engulfed by an eerie mist and are lit from only one direction. Why did so many old-time directors favor this kind of weird treatment? The obvious answer is that drawing each individual head in the crowd would have been time-consuming and take too much attention away from the main characters. Look at these sharply-drawn Jack Davis heads (above). I don't know about you but I spend a lot more time looking at the faces in the crowd than the people in the car. So that might be the answer.....but it's not the only possible answer. Maybe zombie audiences were just plain funny.