CARTOON ANATOMY: ANIMAL SNOUTS

Cartoonists are generally pretty smart people so I didn't hesitate to put up this highly scientific discussion of dog snouts. Children will probably find it rough and some of the Latin names may be a little obscure, but keep a dictionary close and you should get through it OK. Alright, here goes....

ANIMAL SNOUTS

Like everybody else I have a special fondness for dog snouts. The dog's whole body seems to be seems to be nothing more than a delivery system for the snout. The nose and the mouth are indisputably the business end of the dog. The decorative fur thins out and the skull streamlines as we head out to the torpedo tip of the muzzle. It looks like a dog was designed to sniff out prey (or other dogs' butts), and eat it.

Amazingly, dog noses are made of leather! Why that should be I don't know. Maybe they're made to sniff on rough ground or poke around in rat holes. Is leather better for smelling? Maybe. Maybe it keeps the nose cold for some useful reason. Look at those little hexagons all over surface. Every time I try to feel them my dog nudges my hand away and licks me. The nose seems to be surprisingly sensitive considering it's an overgrown wallet.



It's hard to understand all that leather because humans aren't like that. Our noses are soft and mushy. We don't have a snout. Everything on our face seems to get equal emphasis. Our bodies seem to be support systems for our heads, which in turn are support system for our hands. We just want to locate and identify things so we can put our hands all over them. Humans are like squids in that respect.

Dogs are doomed never to be able to pass themselves off as high-class. No matter how much they put on airs the floppy, friendly tongue reveals them to be ordinary Joes, just doing the best they can.
Dogs look really scary when you reveal their teeth. Even more scary is the disgusting, saggy, gooey, black lip. John K says that he introduced black dog lips to the world in his cartoon. "Boo Boo Runs Wild." If you've used black lips without authorization then you owe John a nickle.

I also find it interesting that dogs let us do what must seem like incomprehensible things to them, things like brushing their teeth with a clown brush.

It looks like gorillas have leather faces! Hmmm...If I'm seeing correctly the leather seamlessly turns into gray skin. And the big, flat nose? I'll hazard a guess and say that gorillas have flat noses so their big schnozes won't get in the way of their vision... but why is the nose so big in the first place?

The answer seems to be that nature wants wants all apes to have big noses. Only Zeus knows why.

I digress for a moment to point out that gorilla's forehead, or is it a forehead? You could argue that the face is normal, it's just growing way down out of the gorilla's neck. Hmmm...I can see that Theory Corner will have to do a post on foreheads soon.

Here's (above) a camel snout and the nose doesn't seem to be made of leather. Not only that but the nose seems to have slid down from a position on top where it belonged. Puzzling, eh? The mouth has a terrific, purse-lipped, Percy Dovetonsils smile. The eyes have a funny, aristocratic, mocking appearance.


Boy, camels like to mug for the camera! Dig that lower lip!

OK, that's enough science for now! A warning: I may not be able to post tomorrow

THEORY CORNER "BEAUTIFUL GIRL OF THE MONTH"

Now, now, guys! I can't give away her number so don't bother asking!

FASHION 1916-1922

I was going to quit talking about fashion for a while but Jenny Lerew challenged me to defend my proposition that late teens and early twenties fashions sucked and I couldn't resist taking her up on it. Here's the evidence, culled from period sources.

Everybody thinks of the 1920s as the flapper decade, forgetting that before the short-skirted flapper was the long-skirted, shapeless, deco, melting dowager style. In the teens there was a transitional stage to deco which attempted to keep the older, Gibson Girl style and modify it to fit the new sensibility. You can see this transitional style in the 1917 newsreel above.


Eventually the modified Gibson dress was thrown out in favor of the entirely new, but even worse deco style. It's hard to imagine that royalty (above) could have had such bad taste. The dress adds 20 years to the age of the poor princess wearing it.

The top of this dress (above) is plain but not horrible, but what about the corn husk bottom?

The loose, shapeless dress above is made even worse by the low waist line.

Here (above) is woman as a kind of long candy bar or TV remote.

Here's (white dress, above) a "Dr. Giggles"-style nurses uniform adapted to street wear.

Here's (above) a Margaret Dumont-style dress emphasizing the flat chest. Bras were a new invention in those days and they were used for flattening, not uplifting. As the 20s wore on the flappers would keep the flat chest, shorten the hem and give women German army helmets but that's a post for another day.

A TERRIFIC BOB CLAMPETT STORY

The best Clampett story in print, the best one that I know about anyway, is in Stan Freberg's autobiography pictured above.

A lot of this happens near the KTLA lot (above), off Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. KTLA is a lot bigger than it appears here but this frustratingly incomplete picture was the best I could get. Leon Schlesinger's outfit was on this lot when Warners owned it. I haven't been on the lot since Bob was alive but I vividly remember the tour he gave us. He bluffed his way past the guard at the gate and showed us around til the security people kicked us off. On the way out he showed us the empty spot in the parking lot where Termite Terrace used to be.

Anyway, Stan was a writer and puppeteer on Bob's daily live-action puppet show, "Time for Beany." It was a tough job. When he and Daws Butler finished the show they'd take themselves full of sweat to a restaurant across the street, get a bite to eat, then get started writing the next show right there in the booth. Here's the way Stan tells it (click to enlarge)....

Is that not a great story!? This is one of several reasons why I think Bob had a large role to play in the creation of Bugs Bunny. More than any other Warners director or writer, Bob WAS Bugs in real life. The real Bob did an awful lot of the things Bugs would do.... like moving writer friends into parked cars and condemned buildings!

ASBERGERS AND TOURETTES SYNDROME

This is a post about Asberger's Disorder, which I define as nerdism. I don't have Asbergers myself but I have acquaintances who do and they're such nice people that I can't help taking an interest in their ailment.

This illness was diagnosed in the early 90s by a pediatrician named Asberger who worked with autistic children. Autistic people have problems interacting and communicating with other people. They make odd, repetitive sounds and fixate on objects. Extreme cases are lost in their own world. Asberger realized that nerd behavior was a mild form of autism and may be treatable by methods developed for autistics. The kid in the video above does a pretty good job of explaining it.





If the girl in the video above seems familiar it's probably because you've seen similar women in sci-fi and comics conventions. Hers is a physical type. I realized this years ago when I was at a sci-fi convention and found myself surrounded by nerds who all had similar physical characteristics. I remember thinking, "If nerdism is nothing but a lifestyle choice then why do so many nerds speak, talk and walk the same?" It dawned on me that nerdism must be a condition or a disease. I told all my friends about it and they thought I was crazy. None of us had ever heard of Asberger's Disorder.

Incidentally, I don't mean to imply that nerds are automatons with no individual characteristics, just that they share certain distinct behaviors.





Nerdism sometimes allows for intense focus, which is an advantage, so a lot of nerds don't want to give it up. For those who do there are treatments: anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs are sometimes useful.





This last video (above) has nothing to do with Asbergers. It's about Tourettes Syndrome. I stumbled on it while looking for Asberger media. Boy, Tourettes makes Asbergers seem like a walk in the park!

ANOTHER "DINNER WITH ANDRE" (ACTUALLY JOHN K.)

Let's see...I arrived late and caught John doodling on the paper place mat. We said hello, briefly talked about John's latest blog, and agreed that we were both fine people who the rest of the world would do well to emulate. We placed our orders and John asked for his usual side order of onion which, remarkably, arrived at the table freshly sliced, Just the way he likes it.

John opened up the serious talk of the evening with a with a flat statement that Larry Fine was an unjustly neglected Stooge. He said that Moe was responsible for Larry getting less screen time than Curly. I was amazed. I never heard John say anything bad about Moe before. We agreed that Larry was necessary to the word music of the trio and the pizza came.

Fred Krippin's name came up -- Fred was the genius behind "Roger Ramjet" and the National Lumber commercials-- and I said Fred was a terrific sound editor as well as a terrific director. John talked about how important a good sound track is and how the great sound people don't get the credit they deserve. Fortunately we know about Treg Brown, the great Warners' sfx man, but we don't know much about how he and Stalling collaborated.

Neither of us knew who did the Stooges sfx. It's amazing that someone could do such good work and remain anonymous. John said the Stooge sfx were used in other Columbia shorts but not effectively.

We talked about baggy shorts and maxi-skirts heralding the decline of Western civilization and marveled that that Jenny Lerew could like the early 1920s clothes that I blogged about. Seeking a more manly subject than women's clothes, we speculated about two art slumps that may have occurred between 1890 and 1923. John said something similar might have occurred in the early 50s. He cited the close, curly, George Washington women's hair styles that spinsters and old ladies wore in the 50s.

There we were talking about women's things again and, seeking balance, we decided to talk about...nazis. We agreed that what art schools need to clean up their act is a few nazi art teachers who would force students to learn how to draw whether they like it or not.

Well, all good things come to an end. John generously handed me the box containing the uneaten pizza and I put it in the car. I was sorely tempted to eat it while driving but I remembered my poor, ragged family who were probably shivering by the dying embers in the fireplace, waiting for me to come home with a few crumbs to sustain life through the night. I would save the pizza for them.

For most of the trip I stalwartly avoided looking at the pizza box then I thought, "Well, what the heck? A look won't hurt." Then I figured one bite won't hurt, and then I thought no one would want the slice with a bite out of it so I had to eat the whole piece. Then...then only the box remained by the time I got home.

WHAT WERE COWBOYS REALLY LIKE?

Well, we know they didn't look like Roy Rogers (above). It's an appealing image though, fine for Western singers. I can't help wondering if the future will submit hippies, goths and hip-hoppers

to the same kind of unhistorical design exaggeration.

In the Frank Sinatra era hat brims shrunk and history was rewritten so that the Wild West brims could shrink too.

Sergio said that cowboys wore long dust protectors. Did they?

Here's (above) the latest historical re-write. Cowboys in the old West are re-cast as modern urban cowboys with the now fashionable potato chip brim.

Apparently some cowboys used to look a little like hippies. That's not the way I like to think of them but it's that way on some 19th century posters so I guess I'll have to make the adjustment.

I have a feeling real cowboys looked like they do in this staged picture (above), though I'm not certain. Pictures like the one above were taken just after WWI when fashion was the worst it's ever been in this country. Maybe the shapeless fashion of the time influenced their perception of what cowboys looked like.

One of these days I'll do a blog about the mysterious decline of artistic taste in the U.S. just after the first world war. Fortunately it only raged for a few years but it was a horrible blight while it lasted. This dress (above) was designed in that period.


Just for contrast here's (above) the way people dressed in the 1890s. It was far better than what you saw on the street 20 years later.