A TRIBUTE TO SALOON PAINTINGS

Am I the only one here who likes saloon paintings? I mean the reclining nudes that always occupy the center space over the bar in the old westerns. It's in the interest of the bar to put one up because every red-blooded man will be tempted to order an extra drink just so he can toast the lady.


Of course we're cartoonists and if we were painting the bar picture we might put up something a little different. I could see this Milt Gross guy reclining in a bunch of grapes and cupids, couldn't you? Don Martin would have made a good saloon painter. Of course his pictures would have needed those long Baroque frames with all the gold curly-cues.


Bar nudes can't be too sexy. If they are the patrons won't try to toast the lady, they'll try to jump over the bar and rub her bottom.

THE NEXT NEW THING

This is an exciting time to be in the animation industry because it's possible to glimpse the new thing that's coming and it's a doosey. Thank heaven! I thought I'd burst if I had to sit through another CGI feature of a bunch of wacky misfits who are forced to seek a new home or another 2-D TV show featuring nerds and smart-alec kids in suburbia. And screw anime! It's just not good enough! In my opinion what's coming is embodied in these thumbnail copies of Milt Gross poses that I drew at ASIFA. Much credit to Steve Worth and Mark Kausler for making them available. If they don't excite you that's because you dismiss them as being old-fashioned print-media drawings that could never animate...but they do animate. In fact there's plenty of precedent for it, which I'll discuss in future posts.

HOW MY KID DISCOVERED BREASTS

What follows is a completely trivial story. It's so mind-numbingly banal that I can't believe I'm trying to foist it off on other people. I'm just too sleepy to come up with something better! Oh, well! Here it is.....

I've always been influenced by things I've read. A case in point is an article I read about something called childhood amnesia. According to the author in later life your kid will forget nearly everything that happened before the age of four. Isn't that interesting?

Now maybe I was eating chicken when I read this because for me the compelling application of this idea was that I could give my two-year old the legs of the chicken rather than the breast and he'd never remember it. The cute little twerp never ate most of the food on his plate and was indifferent to chicken. I, on the other hand loved chicken, especially the breast when it was slow cooked upside-down in an oven so it retained all its natural juices. I figured I'd introduce him to chicken breasts when he was four, that way he'd believe he had them all his life. It was a silly thought, I now realize, but at the time I thought it was a revelation from heaven.

As it happened I forgot to tell him about breast meat for an extra two years. That's two extra years of juicy, to-die-for meals for his grateful dad. One night when he was six my wife cooked a particularly succulent chicken and put it hot and steaming in the middle of the table. My kid eyed the legs and licked his lips as usual. I decided to celebrate the world-class chicken by opening a special bottle of wine I'd been saving so I went out to the kitchen to get it. Little did I know that my wife was carving in my absence and gave me a leg and my son a big, heaping slab of breast meat.

When I came in I poured some wine into my wife's glass and as I did so I heard my kid say, "Hey, there's something strange about this chicken." Strange? What strange? I looked at my kid and he was thoughtfully touching his tongue to a morsel of breast meat on his fork. Inside I had a fit! "Uh, Kid,...if you don't like that I guess I can trade my leg for it." I began but he stopped me. "That's alright, Dad. It's not horrible." I could see the moist flavor bubbles on the surface of his chicken. "Really, I don't mind trading, Kid." He waved me off. "Dad it's actually (Munch!)...mmmm...actually...(Munch! Munch!) well, kind of interesting." I frantically sniffed my chicken leg as if to savor it. "Yes but legs, AH, now that's flavor!" My son: "Yes but this is not just (Munch! Dribble!)...I mean... (Drool! Munch! Dribble! Munch!)this is REALLY GOOD!" No more thoughtfull eating after that. He shoveled it in like there was no tomorrow. "It's so odd that I never realized how good chicken was before!"

From then on he got the breast and I got the leg. I just couldn't bare to withold it from somebody who likes it so much. He's in his twenties now and loves chicken breasts as much as I do. He does remember that there was a time when he didn't find chicken so appealing but he can't remember why.

I

SOME PERSONAL PICTURES

Here's a couple of pictures (above and below) of me surrounded by cartoonist friends, Kali, Margo and Katie. I got the pictures from their blogs. Heh, heh! Eat your heart out guys!

Here I am (above) with Theory Corner fan Sophorn. The man's amazing! He not only draws but builds terrific custom cars as well! The censor stamp is to cover a minor photo distortion that made me appear fatter than I am. I only covered up a little bit of the picture, nothing you'd miss.

Here I am (above) drawing at ASIFA. Once again I used the censor stamp, this time to cover up a tiny distortion in the photo that made me look older than I am. I just covered it up a tad, nothing drastic.


Here I am presenting a cake that Marlo, Katie and Kali made for John's birthday. You don't mind that I used the stamp again do you? It's just a little touch-up. Once again a tiny error in the photo made me look older than I am. Boy, there's a lot of lying camera lenses out there!

SOME PICTURES FOR A BOY'S ROOM

Here's a few pictures I would loved to have had on my wall when I was a young teenager. The picture on the top is from Tesla's lab and shows arcs of high voltage electricity jumping the gap between two Tesla coils. Every self-respecting kid wants a set-up like this in his garage. I tried to find a good black and white photo of Edison's lab, which I also would like to have had, but found nothing that grabbed me.
Here's (above) a picture of two gladiators. It's a grizzly scenario and it appears to have been painted in urine but boys like this kind of spectacle. Click on it to see more detail.


The busy black and white photo is a replica of Sherlock Holmes' flat on Baker Street. The man on the horse is obviously Napoleon. Every kid identifies with Napoleon but few adults do. Kids also identify with pirates. Thanks to The Pirates of the Carribean there's no lack of interesting posters on this subject.

Here also is Attila and his barbarians. As a kid this would have inspired lots of imaginary swordfights as I fought to defend Rome and my bedroom from the screaming hordes.

HOW SHOULD ANIMATION BE PROMOTED?

It occurred to me while writing the boardgame post that I never really liked to play boardgames, even as a kid. What I really liked about them, and the reason why I rifled through them so often, was the promise implicit in the packaging. The promise was that I was in for wild, unspeakable adventure and excitement. I think my whole life was influenced by these promises.
The same promises were made by film trailers and posters for circus and magic shows. "You have to SEE it to believe it! It's the WEIRDEST thing your eyes have ever beheld!" Gee, I love that kind of rhetoric! It addresses itself to the fear that we all have that we'll lead lives of quiet desperation, passing through life without ever tasting real adventure. Ad-makers and promoters know all about this fear. I see them as philosophers who prompt us to change the world to make it more exciting. We should aim to eliminate quiet desperation just like we eliminated smallpox.

How should animation be promoted? Just like the posters promote the projects above! We should use every trick of rhetorical and visual hypebole to promise mystery, excitement, humor and adventure. When that's done, we should break our backs to deliver on the promise! I like the formula that's implicit in the Clampett cartoons: begin the cartoon in such a way as to promise a lot...then deliver even more!

POETRY CORNER AGAIN!

Here's a poem I liked when I was a kid. It's the poem that used to be on the inside of the box of the boardgame, "Clue."

What amazes me about those old boardgames is how successful they were in creating a mood and an identification with the characters. Haunted house and crime games actually gave me a creepy thrill. I thought the games were assembled in real haunted houses which had to be vacated before dark. A Yogi Bear game actually made me feel that somehow Yogi existed and was pleased to know that I was playing his game.

I missed the golden age of board games, which I think was in the 30s and 40s, but I can get a sense of them from museums and antique stores. They were designed to create a whole world when the box was opened. The graphics on the inside of the heavy lid, the weird proportions and textures of the trays, even the weight of the playing pieces was somehow important. A lot of thought seemed to go into giving the user a sensual rush on opening the box.

I saw a 30s Mickey Mouse cel painting kit behind glass in an exhibit on Wilshire. You won't believe this but the inside of the box actually conveyed the real atmosphere you'd encounter in an animation studio. In fact it was BETTER than the real atmosphere! How did they do that!?
Anyway, I'm running out of space. Here's the poem that gave me shivers when I was a kid:

ALL IN THE GAME
by Suzanne Weaver