VISIT FROM A THEORY CORNER READER

It was a dark and stormy night; black storm clouds raced before the moon like ghost riders across the sky. I didn't notice the figure at the door til it was too late and she was already in the room.

Uncle Eddie: "Waddaya want Babe? I'm busy!"

Reader: "Well maybe you're not too busy for this, bucktooth! I came to thrash this thing out

once and for all!"

Uncle Eddie: "Honey, go home! There's nothing to thrash here!"

Reader: "I was on Theory Corner! You didn't answer my comment about about the monkey and the potato salad. You answered Jorge but not me! What am I? A nothing? Is that all I am to you?"

Uncle Eddie: "First of all I'm gonna relieve you of that toy! There! Now we're gonna talk."

Reader: "Ha! you think I need a gun to deal with you!? I'm goin' to the newspapers and show up this site for the hell hole it really is! Now take your hands off me!"

Uncle Eddie: "Do you really want me to take my hands off?"

Reader: "Well I... I...."

Uncle Eddie: "Yes?"

Reader: "I... I... Ooooh, Uncle Eddie!"

THE PAST AND FUTURE OF STORIES

I don't believe I'm attempting something this ambitious in just a few paragraphs. Please be forgiving. I'm not an historian and I'm just winging this without benefit of book or Google search. OK, here goes...

It's hard to imagine but a little more than a century and a half ago the modern adventure story didn't exist. Oh there were stories about Ulysses and King Arthur and Tom Jones and the like but they were long and padded and the highlights were scattered islands in a sea of words.


So far as I know the lean, modern adventure story began with Alexander Dumas, maybe with "The Three Musketeers." That book must have gone off like a bomb in a tea shop! Imagine it, a story consisting of all highlights and almost no filler! A rush to publish followed. Every 19th century writer wanted to try the new technique and whole genres were invented in just a few decades. Poe, Verne, Scott, Doyle, and Sabitini became household words. The public couldn't get enough!



The phenomenon that interests me were the penny dreadfuls and dime novels that sprang up in Dumas' wake. In America they began with Westerns, then the Westerns morphed into short crime stories bundled up into pulp magazines. The public went nuts over the stuff! Cheap, illustrated stories that really delivered the goods; in the days before electronic media the impact must have been enormous!



It wasn't long before the pulps developed colorful covers with bold offset printing. Newsstands sprung up everywhere! Adventure, sex, sci-fi, romance, horror...all for just a few cents! Then, just when story consumption was at its peak and nobody thought it could go any farther....radio and film weighed in. That meant even more venues for stories! It must have been a heady time for writers!

Now in a general way the story revolution was positive but there were some casualties. Short, silent comedies gave way to long, feature-length comedy with disastrous results. It wasn't sound that killed the shorts, (look what The Three Stooges did with sound) and it wasn't problems with exhibitors. It was the public's taste for long-form stories!

The pulp-reading, novel-buying, penny dreadful-excited public craved long-form stories! Long-form comedy was inferior but it didn't matter. The public voted with their dollars!

Cartoons came up against the same problem. The public craved long-form stories and Disney gave it to them with "Snow White." Superb short cartoons re-emerged at Warners and MGM but in a subsidiary role to features. Shorts, whether live-action or animated, were the orphaned children of this era.

I'm running out of space so I better wrap this up. Where do stories stand now? Interesting question! In a word the 150 year story explosion has run its course. Story magazines have folded and only Harry potter novels seem to get lines around the block. Theater attendance isn't what it used to be (though it's getting better) and even television is worrying. Amazingly shorts, whether fiction or non-fiction, are back with a vengeance. Electronic media dominates and shorts are its favorite child...

Oddly enough, maybe for reasons only Marshal McLuhan understands, television now demands personality intensive stories. In the new media story exists as an excuse for performance. That's why the Oscars are so popular. Actors are more popular than presidents.

The immediate future of animation in my opinion favors acting-intensive shorts, anywhere from 6 minutes to half an hour in length. In animation that means short scripts with plenty of room for virtuoso performances by artists.

ARE KIDS MORE CREATIVE THAN ADULTS?

Are kids more creative than adults? Of course they're not! How did such an absurd idea ever get started anyway?

Kids aren't wired yet. They're the seed not the fruit. Who wants to be a seed?

Really, if kids are so creative then how come they're so messy?

Maybe they just can't imagine the future, even if it's only an hour later, when they'll have to live with the consequences of their mess.

I think what kids are good at is storing vivid memories of pleasant times, memories that will come in useful when they become creative adults.

Kids are all anxious to become adults and who can blame them? Kids are tribal, are quick to ridicule other kids who don't conform, and are especially vulnerable to trends and fads. Does that sound creative to you?

Now adults on the other hand...like (ahem!) me...that's different.

Adults are fine and noble chaps! They're good conversationalists. You can talk to an adult. You can reason with them! And the ideas! They have SUCH ideas!

I think the reason why kids' creativity is so over-rated is that they make bold drawings on art projects. Maybe that's because they don't have to pay for the pigments. If I were to think about making a bold, red background like the one above I'd be calculating the cost. Kids don't have to do that.

One last point: people are always saying that kids are born creative and society knocks it out of them. Is there any evidence for that? The reason playfull kittens turn into sleepy adults probably has nothing to do with the way cats are socialized. Aren't they just playing out their biology? Maybe human kids are doing the same thing.

Don't get me wrong about all this, I love kids even if they're a bit spaced-out. They're cute little buggers aren't they?

WELCOME TO "THEORYLAND!"

"Greetings viewers and welcome to "Theoryland," the thinkingest place of them all!"

"Every week we'll take you to one of several exciting lands. This week come with us to 'Fromteerland,' where young people can relive the thrilling days of yesterday when our pioneer ancestors hunted down polecats like predatory animation writers."

"Here to tell you more about it is our host, Uncle Eddie..."

"Hello folks and welcome to the show. Here at Theory Corner we always strive to top ourselves and 'Theoryland' is our latest effort. We've chosen to begin the show here in Fromteerland but I thought you might like to get an overview of the whole series. Follow me and I'll see what I can do."

"Of course the cornerstone of our show is good, solid family entertainment...art, history and science combined, something for the mind as well as the eye. Here for example is an organ derived from a male T-Rex. What organ we don't know but our staff is consulting with paleontologists about it right now and when we find out we'll do a show about it."

"Occasionally we'll have visits from Theoryland regulars like Darnold Mallard. Here you see the reaction of Darnold's doctor when he discovers a human face in Darnold's throat. Click to enlarge."

"Expect lots of hair-raising adventures in Fromteerland episodes. Those wily animation writers are always up to no good and it's up to the stars of our historical adventures to ferret them out and bring them to justice."

"Well here's my transportation now! It looks like that's all we have time for this week!"

" Bye for now and remember... KEEP THEORISING!"




Note: Except for the first two drawings all pictures are copyrighted by the Disney company.

"SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT" RECONSIDERED

According to a recent book about EC comics Frederic Wertham (above) , author of "Seduction of the Innocent," spent his declining years denying that he was responsible for the decline of comic books. Well, you can't deny that comics were less interesting after his crusade.

I do wonder sometimes if comics really were as horrific as he said they were. I don't really know because it's so hard to get hold of the old comics. EC comics are still out there in reprints but other titles are harder to find. For the curious here's a few excerpts from old comics. I don't know how typical they are.

Here (above) is comics reformer Judge Charles Murphy with before and after pictures of an offending comic character.

MORE DAUMIER

I can't resist putting more of this up. Daumier was a genius!

STILL MORE ABOUT THE BARRIER BOOK

Mike Barrier's book continues to amaze.

For a while after Harman and Ising (third and sixth from the left in the group shot below) left, Iwerks (with Disney, above) was the only first string animator in the studio. To maximize Iwerks' impact Walt forced a system of assistants and inbetweeners on him, which he apparently resented.

I'm not surprised. It must be hard to come up with something good when a bunch of newcomers are let loose to redraw your scenes. I imagine Iwerks had to lose a lot of time supervising the new guys even though the new system was presented to him as a "time saver." Eventually Iwerks quit.

It didn't matter, Disney continued to tinker with improvements to the system until he came up with the collaborative way of doing things that we have today: the one where animators work from exposure sheets done by someone else, on a story they may have had no part in making, where someone else takes the guts out of their drawing and acting, where every drawing is supposed to be "on model," and their scenes are expected to fit seamlessly into the next guy's scenes.

Compare this to the early days of animation where an animator might be told simply to have his character fight with a turkey for half a minute. The new system might tell the animator exactly what frame the character should lift his leg during the fight. Some animators probably thrived under this kind of control but others like Iwerks must have been disheartened. You get the feeling that a kind of innocence and fun was removed from animation around 1930.

Was Disney's a bad system? No, of course not. It has obvious assets. If an animator works with assistants of his own choosing he really can go faster and sometimes the assistant is a better draughtsman than the animator. Not only that but animators like Scribner and Sibley managed to find sympathetic directors who would give them wider creative latitude. It's hard to imagine that animation's golden age could have occurred under the old system...even so.... did we lose something in exchange for what we gained? Is there a way to get that freshness back?

Just for the heck of it here's a picture of Disney's very first studio in Kansas City. That's the Laugh-O-Gram office on the second floor above the parked car on the right.