ART OF THE FUNNY WALK

Don't you just love a good walk? Walk acts were a whole genre in vaudeville. They were considered a type of "eccentric dancing." Cagney was good walker, so was Buddy Ebson, but I'll bet the best walkers were names nobody would recognize anymore. Here's a great one that Mike turned me on to (above): Dean Martin's uncle Leonard. Sheer bliss to watch!





Another great walk (above) by a guy named Wall. Holy Cow! It makes you want to burn your Preston Blair (well, sort of....)!

SORRY!

Sorry about the Shakespeare rant! I admit that I'm way too sensitive about this subject, and I sincerely apologize. Most Theory Corner people are artists or people who are interested in art. Of course they save their most intense passion for other artists, or for people in fields related to art, like film or music. That's perfectly natural and I was a jerk for making people feel guilty about it.

I still like this play, especially this version of it, but if I ever talk about it again I hope it's in the role of a friend sharing, rather than whatever I was here.

I'll be gone for a couple of days to take care of business but I'll be back before most people know I was away!

MAD

I got one response to the post about "Julius Caesar"...one! What's wrong with you guys!? I thought Theory corner readers were more together than that. Is Shakespeare not good enough? Not worth listening to? Would you care to tell me who's more worth listening to? Is there a better writer that I don't know about!?

The version I put up is, or at least is close to being, an excerpt from a best version. The best version of the best writer isn't worth your attention?

CATALYTIC PERSONALITIES IN ANIMATION

This is about the so-called "catalytic personality." In entertainment this would describe people who are lucky in the sense that great things just seem to happen when they're around. Everybody just seems to do their best work when this kind of person's near, even if they're not working on the same project. Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live, is reputed to have had that quality. Very often the catalyst gets overlooked on the screen credits, yet the project would have been much poorer without him.


Clampett (director of all the cartoons on this page, save the stiff Daffy cartoon above) strikes me as someone who was a catalytic personality. Did he create Bugs Bunny? I'm not aware that any single person did, Bugs appears to have had several fathers (especially Tex), but it's impossible to imagine Bugs arising without Bob's influence, at least indirectly. Things happened around Bob. Look at the vibrancy of the other pictures on this page. What does that tell you about someone like Bob?


But this isn't a piece about Clampett, it's about catalytic personalities in general. It's sad to realize that catalytic personalities are so often overlooked and under-rated. There's no screen credit that reads: "The person who goaded, provoked, planted seeds, and gave away gags to friends that he would like to have kept for himself." That credit doesn't exist.


In animation a catalytic personality does more than contribute gags. His gags lead to something. They suggest a vision and and an over-all structure.  You ask this kind of person for a gag, expecting to get something like, "How about if he steps on a rake?", and you instead get a gag that suggests a unique character doing something that only that character would do.  You get an action that suggests a new way of pacing the scene, maybe the whole cartoon.  The gag forces you to re-evaluate your whole way of looking at what you're doing.  Catalytic personalities like to wrap up their gags in something larger and more useful.

 

One of the reasons catalytics can be so helpful is that they're constantly running story ideas and character types through their minds. These people don't offer gags, they offer pre-thought out worlds.  The gag is often something deep that's been simmering in the pot for years. It may be a fragment of a structure they'd been painstakingly building for their own use. The risk they run is that you'll run away with the larger idea the gag implies,  and then they won't be able to use it themselves. These are generous people who take big risks for no credit. 

 

The person I know who best fits this description is John Kricfalusi. Things mysteriously happen around John. People get lucky around him. Ideas somehow improve. The man has contributed millions of dollars worth of ideas to projects all around town, but is probably officially credited mostly in the cartoons he's made himself. 

 
I wonder what other people this would apply to. The big names are obvious but I'm thinking of less well-known names like Bill (Bob?)Nolan who worked on the early Lantz Oswalds.

 

AUDIO EXCERPT FROM WELLES' "JULIUS CAESAR" Pt.2

Here's part two of that post, the one that contains what I believe is the best expression of friendship in all of English literature, the best I know of, anyway. Brutus and Cassius are allies and close friends but they have irreconcilable differences and they clash just before the play's final battle. The way Shakespeare has them reconcile is nothing short of brilliant.

It's a pity that I had to trim this to bare bones so that it would fit into YouTube's 10 minute limit. Now I have to decide whether to put up part one. It contains Marc Antony's speech to the crowd after the assassination of Caesar. It's probably the best speech in the English language, and this is a terrific version, but it depends on Brutus's speech to set it up, and I had to cut that for time. I put up this awkward,too-lean version on YouTube but I might refrain from running it here.

Aaaargh! I just watched the clip again and realized I said Marc Antony met with Brutus when I meant to say Cassius! Sorry, my mother had a stupid child!

HARLAN ELLISON'S TERRIFIC RADIO SHOW

Sorry about the excessive chatting. I'll try to make these introductions shorter. Also, I haven't given up on outdoor photography and printed posts. I just can't stop playing with the new built-in camera, but that won't last forever.

Eshniner wrote in with a link where Ellison damns to perdition all who would use his material without paying for it. I don't know if that includes blogs like this one but just to be safe I'll have to refrain from putting up more of the radio show. Too bad. It might have introduced the man to some people who didn't know about him before.

Ellison isn't only a writer, he's a performer. You can tell from listening to the video excerpts. Those clips were beautifully orchestrated to take advantage of Ellison's unique style of delivery. It's important to hear things like this because you get a lot more out of his written work, especially the essays, when you can imagine the way he'd read them.

More Ellison, more authorized Ellison, can be found on YouTube interviews and on his unofficial fan site: harlanellison.com/

A CHEWING GUM COMMERCIAL!

Here's a "tiurF yciuJ" chewing gum commercial done in the Kovacs style. Sorry for the bad sound edits.