OUTCAULT

Outcault was of course, the creator of Hogan's Alley and of the Yellow Kid, America's first regular comic strip character. Outcault was a terrific draughtsman, and a wonderful colorist.

I used to find his work off-putting and old-fashioned, maybe because the one panel, super-large format seemed like an inefficient way to tell a story. Somewhere along the line I came to accept the strip on its own terms, story be damned, and now I love it. In the day when newspapers seemed as big as bed sheets the effect of these poster-size pages must have been nothing less than glorious.

Bye the way, look at how saturated the color is here (above). Is that a result of computer enhancement or were the original newspaper pages like that? 

I'm guessing that this muted color (above) is what the public saw. Outcault distracts us from the dim color by reserving his brightest colors for the foreground and muting the backgrounds.

Haw! He didn't always get his perspective right, but it doesn't matter.  

This (above) looks like a page from a book, and maybe these were the bold colors that Outcault would have preferred to work with. The subject is unfortunately racist but I include it here because the execution is so beautiful.

  Boy, Outcault cartoons inspired toys (above) even in the late 1890s! I wonder if any toys were made of the Thomas Nast characters? Were there Boss Tweed dolls? There must have been lots of Nast Santa Clauses.

Near the end of the run Hogan's Alley Outcault began his popular Buster Brown strip and that spawned even more toys.

For comparison, here's (above) toys made from McKay's characters.

By the way, I'm sorry to run these toy pictures without attribution. I'll try to find out where they came from and put up a link to it. 

MORE RECENT ASTRONOMY PICTURES

Above is Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. It's tiger stripe surface constantly changes due to water ice escaping from the interior and reshaping the surface. Recently discovered gravitational fluctuations indicate that a large liquid ocean may exist under the surface, making Enceladus a candidate for life.

Where the moon gets its warmth isn't understood. Another moon of more or less the same size and distance from Saturn is completely dead.

The inflation theory has come under attack recently by scientists who claim that it's not needed to explain why the universe is as uniform as it is. In March new data was recorded by a microwave observatory at the South Pole that seems to confirm the inflation theory. The findings are controversial and the facts are still being checked.

Here's (above) an odd one: a galaxy that's tearing itself apart from the inside. Not much star formation is visible in the pinwheel, but lots of recently created star clusters appear in the matter ejected from the galaxy.

Above, the Great Nebula in Orion, about 1500 light years away. It's in the same spiral arm that we inhabit. The colors are unfortunately false. They're added to code  temperature and composition.

Here (above) are new gamma ray photos of the center of our galaxy. They've caused quite a stir because they may be evidence that particles of dark matter (called "WIMPS) are colliding with each other there, and producing much more gamma rays than present theory allows for. This conclusion is so far hotly contested.

VENTRLOQUIST DUMMIES

I don't know why, but grotesque, even evil, puppet designs have been a staple of childrens media ever since Punch and Judy.

When I was a little kid I used to watch the Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney show (above) and at least once I got a terrible nightmare from thinking about the creepy way Jerry used to roll his eyes to the side.

A digression: Mike has a film showing Paul Winchell with a puppet version of himself. The body is one of the best I've ever seen on a ventriloquist's dummy.

Back on topic: one of the scariest kids show puppets of all time might have been Foodini from a kids show called (I'm guessing) "Pinhead and Foodini."

I've never seen the show...maybe it didn't play in my town. Was this character (above) a regular? He looks like a burn victim in the throws of great pain...something out of Dante's Inferno.

Above, another evil Foodini character.

Even the compositions in that show sometimes came off as evil...or am I imagining that?

Stories like the ones told by The Brothers Grimm are full of creepy ideas and yet my strong intuition is that these tales are good for kids. So where do you draw the line? I wish I knew.

FIVE TV COMMERCIALS

Wow! I LOVE this Nespresso commercial! This version seems a bit abrupt though. Maybe it's cut down.

I'm a big believer in using Magic Realism in commercials, like they did here. Short subjects should be the realm of impressions and fantasy, not of thought-out, logical premises.


Here's 'Another terrific commercial in a similar vein. It could use a little trimming.



Boy, there's a number of good, high-end, Italian theatrical commercials out there now. What do you think of this one?



On a different note, here's (above) my favorite TV pizza commercial. It's for Little Caesar's "Combo Mambo" pizza. It's funny, the pacing and staging are wonderful, and the melody is catchy in the extreme.

Okay, it starts slow, the film is washed out, and you have to see it several times in order to remember what company it's promoting. Maybe that's why it airs so much...with only one viewing you'd never associate it with Little Caesar's. Even so.......

Last, and very definitely least, is this ad (above) for Brand.com which floods companies like Amazon with phony endorsements to counteract bad reviews. I can't believe that TV stations accept ads like this. It portrays ordinary people who write negative reviews as pigs and "internet trolls."

I couldn't get the ad to play here, but you can watch it on the Brand.com site: http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7fCg/brand-com-reputation

MY LUNCH WITH MIKE

Here's my own version of the Welles/Jaglom restaurant-type dialogue, with Mike as a sort of Orson Welles.  It's a fairly accurate account of what we actually talked about there, but Mike won't allow me to post his picture so I've had to represent him with pictures of Tex Avery's wolf. If you've ever been in a restaurant with Mike you  know how apt that is. The man is never less than fully aware of what the pulchritude in the room is doing. 


INT. RESTAURANT:


EDDIE: "I wish I could remember which actor said that the purpose of the acting in a scene is to make it memorable."

MIKE: "Yeah, like Eli Wallach did with Tuco in 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.' "

EDDIE: "Wow! A great example! Everything he did in that film was memorable. He went way beyond what must have been in the script."

MIKE: "That's what every actor should do. It's an actor's job to bring something to the table that only he can provide. 90% of acting is cast...Uh, Eddie, QUICK! Look at the salad bar! The girl...the girl!"

EDDIE: "Huh? That's not a girl...that's a guy."

MIKE: "No, no, no! Marone!!!! Not him! What's the matter with you? The girl behind the salad bar!"

EDDIE: "Can we get back to..."

MIKE: "Oh, yeah...sure, sure...I didn't mean to interrupt your high tone babbling with something as trivial as a drop dead gorgeous girl. Paaardon moi. So what were you jabbering about, Edward?"

EDDIE: "Acting."

MIKE: "Acting? Oh, right...okay. Well, remember what Jodi Foster said in that Esquire article...the one where they ask a famous person, 'What have you learned?' " She said she learned the most from DeNiro when they were doing the Taxi film."

EDDIE: "Really? What did he say?...er, Mike, you're not paying attention!"

MIKE; "Did you see what JUST WALKED IN? Did you SEE her? Oh, my Gaaaawd!"

EDDIE: "That's her boyfriend with her. You're gonna get a knuckle sandwich, wait and see."

MIKE: It'd be worth it, it'd be worth it!!!!

EDDIE: "...MIKE! Nearby: oyfriendbay (Pig Latin for 'boyfriend'). Ucklenay andwichsay (Pig Latin for 'knuckle sandwich') coming this way."


MIKE: "Okay, okay. Don't worry about it. Well, DeNiro took Foster out to lunch four times and every time he went over her lines with her. She didn't understand why because she already knew her lines but the fourth time she realized what was going on. He was trying to provoke her to be the character the lines were about, and not just a reader of lines.

He said it was okay to deviate from the lines if she was totally in character and remembered to bring it all back to the phrase that would justify his dialogue, which came next. Foster said she never forgot that."

EDDIE: "That's great! That must be how Woody....."

MIKE: "EDDIEEDDIEEDDIEEDDIE!!!!! Speaking of a WOODY, check out that girl behind the counter! The one with the black hair. OOH, MY GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWDDDD!!!!!!!!..........."

*************************

LUNCH WITH ORSON WELLES

A new book has come out: "My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles," edited by Peter Biskind. If you're a Welles fan like I am this is must reading. I'll digest a few quotes from the book, and mention that these are Welles' opinions, not my own.


ABOUT JOHN FORD:

"I recently saw what I've always been told was Jack's (John Ford's) greatest movie, and it's terrible. The Searchers. He made many very bad pictures."

ABOUT ART DECO:

"I hate it, you see? I deeply hate it...the maid's furniture is what it is. I knew that Deco was bad_let me be modest_when I was as young as fourteen! And I was so happy after the World War, when people started building other things."


WHO REALLY DIRECTED THE THIRD MAN:

"I said, 'No he (the Harry Lime character played by Welles) has to be fascinating. You must understand why he's got this city in his hand.' And Carol [Reed] took a flyer on that idea and changed the character completely. Greene's Harry Lime was nothing like the way I played it. Every word that I spoke, all my dialogue, I wrote, because Carol wanted me to. Including the 'cuckoo clock.' "

[Elsewhere he credits Korda and Reed for the film.]


ABOUT CHAPLIN AND KEATON:

"Chaplin had too much beauty. He drenched his pictures with it. That's why Keaton is...so much better."


ON LAWRENCE OLIVIER:

"He has to act. He doesn't care if it's a bad movie or a bad play. He has to work. Which is admirable. That's why he went so far beyond me as an actor...he was_and is_a professional, whereas I don't see acting as a profession, as a job, never have. I am an amateur. An amateur is a lover...with all the caprices and the difficulties of love. I don't feel compelled to work. And Larry does. A professional turns up on Wednesday afternoons."


ON THALBERG:

"Thalberg was the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood. Before him, a producer made the least contribution...he didn't direct, he didn't act, he didn't write...all he could do was mess it up, which he didn't do very often, or tenderly caress it. Support it. Producers would only go onto the set to see that you were on budget.

Now the producer's gotta be creative. The director becomes the fellow whose only job is to say, 'Action' and 'Cut.' [With Thalberg] you were 'just a director' on a 'Thalberg production.' Don't you see? A role had been created in the world."

MY HERO: RUDOLPHE TOPFFER

I thought I'd put up a blog about Topffer, the Swiss artist who's said to have invented the comic strip. All the illustrations in this post are by Topffer. I have a book about the man but I've only spot read in it so far so I hope there's no errors in the chronology.

Let's see....well, in a way the comic strip can be said to have begun in England with lithographic artists like Hogarth, Rowlandson and Gillray. These guys didn't draw serial comic stories but they pioneered the idea of simplified, funny drawings. Before these guys, drawings appearing in print were labored and were expected to have classical artistic merit.

Maybe Napoleon can take some of the credit for the birth of cartooning because the war against him compelled the British to crank up the production of caricatures insulting the French. Cartooning, which was previously shunned as low class, was now regarded as positively patriotic. Of course, after the war a lot of skilled caricaturists were left with nothing to do and once again cartooning began to be perceived as low class.

Enter Rudolphe Topffer, a young university professor in Geneva. He collected wartime English caricatures and was emboldened to try his hand at it after reading a serious book about the shape of people's heads revealing their true personalities. Since caricature was considered beneath the dignity of a professor he had to draw in his basement, out of sight of snooping eyes.

Topffer drew even more loose than the English. Biographers speculate that this is because he had bad eyesight but it may also have come about because he was only an artist in his spare time. Anyway, influenced by his book of heads, he developed a comedic style that didn't depend on political caricature.

It's a good thing he disdained politics because this endeared him to Goethe who hated political caricature. When Topffer published his first book in 1830 Goethe loudly endorsed it, and that opened a lot of doors for the Swiss artist.

Unfortunately his overnight popularity also worked against him. The print run for that book was only a few hundred copies which quickly sold out. After that large numbers of pirate editions were made and a host of imitators sprung up.

One of these was Cham, an artist hired by the publisher to transfer Topffer's drawings onto lithographic stone. Cham took Topffer's serial panel technique, combined it with his own Daumier-type style, and rushed into print with his own books, which sold very well.

In order to compete with his imitators Topffer increasingly put an emphasis on cartoon acting, something the imitators had trouble with. Some of the drawings in his subsequent books looked like still frames from animated cartoons...in fact, you could argue that Topffer was the father of animated cartoons as well as comics. Anyway, his imitators hit back with an English innovation...the word balloon.

Poor Topffer, being a literature professor, clung to the caption and disdained the balloon. For Topffer the incongruity between the sedate caption and the outrageous drawing was what gave cartoons their appeal, but the public increasingly disagreed. Captions lingered on right up to the 20th Century but the word balloon eventually prevailed.

After the mid-19th Century I don't know what happened to Topffer. He was highly regarded by artists but became less known by the public. Maybe his innovations were dimmed by the entry into cartooning of first rate professional artists like Daumier, Dore, Lear and Wilhelm Busch. Maybe his skeptical attitude toward radical politics put people off. I'm not sure.

Anyway, let's raise a Theory Corner glass to the memory of Topffer who did so much to advance cartooning and the comic strip.