THEORY CORNER SPORTS PAGE: MUHAMMAD ALI & SECRETARIAT

Just to show Ali's method, here's (above) a quick win that he scored against Brian Lamb in 1966.




Above and below Cassius Clay (Ali) vs. Sonny Liston. Liston hated Clay and on one of the rounds they kept fighting even after the bell. What a battle!







The fight was stopped by a doctor after part three, so if you're in a hurry you can skip part four. Watch it if you can, though; it's a fascinating glimpse into what the people who ran the fights were like in the 60s.





Above and below two races by Secretariat in the early 70s. These are hands down the best races I've ever seen. Seabiscuit certainly was an interesting horse, and I liked the film, but could he do this?

MY FAVORITE ARTIST'S MODEL BOOK

I have to admit that a reference book about artist's models is a strange subject to post about on the Saturday before Easter. I hope the airbrushed nudity doesn't offend anyone. I'm so excited about finding this rare and useful book in the library that I feel I have to share it so that I can free my mind to think about other things. Click to enlarge.

I'll let you know what the title is as soon as I can locate a copy to buy on the net.

I LOVE WRITERS!

I love writers, real writers, but our industry doesn't seem to have attracted many of them.

Visit an animation artist's site and you're likely to see samples of what the guy did recently, paintings by favorite artists, and the like. Visit an animation writers site and you're likely to see gripes about not getting residuals, nostalgia for super-fast writers of the past, shop talk about who's hiring and the like. No celebration of beautiful words, no discussion of clever plots. If you're a fan of good writing, which I am, it's disappointing.

One thing that does abound in animation writers' sites is slick prose. The notes and memos these guys send to each other are beautiful. I don't mind saying that I'm envious. If any of these guys offers to teach memo writing I'm there. They're models of economy, euphony and wit. Verbs instead of adjectives, everything in the present tense; Stunk & White would be proud. Unfortunately for these guys there's no memo industry to absorb them. They had a skill with no place to go, so they bailed out into animation, which they dominate.

If I can digress for a minute.... did you know that at one time arists dominated the pulp sci-fi industry? Well, sort of. The editor of one one of the early science fiction magazines (Gernsback? Cambell? Amazing Stories? Astounding?) used to provoke his artists to come up with wild, imaginative covers then, when he got something he liked, he called in a writer to write a story that would justify it. Interesting, huh?

When I heard this the first time I felt sorry for the writers, who after all are entitled to dominate the industry that they created (Jules Verne, H.G. Wells), but I sometimes wonder if my sympathy was misplaced. Some writers like to call the post-pulp era the golden age of science fiction, but was it? You could argue that the writer-driven psychological stories that came to dominate sci-fi eventually killed it. Maybe the genre was healthier when it dealt with weird gadgets and monsters. Maybe but....hmmmm, I think I'll still come down on the writers side on this one. It just makes sense to me that writers should call the shots in their own writing industry.

And animators should call the shots in the animation industry! Why do writers fail to see the wisdom of that? Well, there's an obvious answer. Money. Animation writers are like kids in a candy store. There's gold in them thar hills! After the style and tone of a show is set the rest of the stories are easy to write and there's lots of time left over to write freelance stories for other projects. Animation writers are often loaded to the gills with freelance! They can't be bothered to edit a script to a proper length (it's faster to write a long script than a short one), or to figure out really clever plots and dialogue (Sigh!).

Well, I still like writers. Real writers, that is, writers who care about character, plot, humor and writing for performance. I'll end with that. There's more to say but this'll do for a start.

BTW, I know of a couple of writer sites that are all about classic comics and drawn media. I have nothing but sympathy and well wishes for these sites but they don't amount to a contradiction of what I said about animation writers not discussing words and plots with any frequency.

Also BTW, the pictures here are of Shakespeare, Hugo and Dickens.

THE BABY AD

I liked this ad for Pet Evaporated Milk (above) so much that a few years ago I thumbnailed an animated version of it just to see what it might look like. Some of the mother drawings are terrible and I was tempted to redraw this before posting it here but the old drawings have the virtue of being done and that counts for a lot. Anyway thanks to John K whose drawings of my kids inspired this. John draws the best babies ever.

GWEETINGTH ART LOVERTH! (Part 2)

A day at the art museum with Uncle Eddie! We don't stand on formalities here, let's plunge right in!

Here's (above) Gainsborough's "Blue Boy." Cartoonists love it because it's the ultimate depiction of a sissyfied Lord Fauntleroy-type. The painting wasn't based on the Fauntleroy novel, and the boy in the novel wasn't a sissy, but the public remembers him that way and who am I to dispute it? Anyway, this painting and I have history.

One halloween I went out and bought a Fauntleroy/Blue Boy suit. I raced home with it, chuckling all the way, thinking of all the gags I could play with it. Breathlessly I put it on in the bathroom, carefull not to look in the mirror till the ensemble was complete. At long last I finished adjusting the lace collar, put the hat on, and proudly stared into the mirror, expecting to erupt with laughter.

Well... it was a looooong look and I felt like doing anything but laughing. I struggled to identify the emotion I was feeling. To my surprise it was...no use trying to hide it...violence. I wanted to hit the figure in the mirror. I couldn't figure out why. I wasn't a gay-basher in real life, why the sudden impulse to destroy? Puzzled, I walked into the living room to see what my family thought. I thought I'd get a laugh from at least one of them. Instead they all turned white with horror. My wife finally said in a tembling voice: "Eddie, that suit...it makes me want to...to hit you." That did it. I packed up the suit and retired it.

I'm convinced that what I felt had nothing to do with resentment against gays. Even gays would have wanted to hit the person in the mirror. The suit is simply the most potent lure to violence ever created. It would have turned Ghandi into a bully. It just has bad juju.

Moving along, here's (above) the "Mona Lisa." I have to say that it looks funny to me and I sometimes wonder if that was Leonardo's intention. I thought that seeing it in person might give me an insight but when I stumbled across it in the Louvre it was roped off, covered with glass, heavily guarded and surrounded by the backs of tall tourists. I couldn't see a thing. Ah, well.

Here's (above) the Venus di Milo, beloved by cartoonists everywhere because they're always trying to think of dirty things her arms might be doing. Of course Venus isn't the most revered scupture. That honor belongs to the plaster hood ornament-type figure that you always see on pedestals in the homes of the cartoon rich. I wonder if that scupture ever really existed. It looks a little like a famous black Donatello (or is it Cellini) figure but that's not quite the same.

On this wall (above) we find "Whistler's Mother," another cartoonist favorite. Boy, she keeps a clean home! It always strikes me as funny when people sit with their shoulder against a wall even if it's in a reataurant. I mean the natural thing is to sit with the wall at your back. How odd it is to press yourself against a man-made cliff with all the pictures on one side diminishing in railroad perspective infront of you.

Last but not least, Grant Wood's "American Gothic." You can laugh at this picture but it'll be around when all of us have turned to dust. There's something so primal and funny about it. It's how every adolescent regards his parents, how every writer regards his editors, how every employee regards his boss. If you're a painter, and all you want is to be remembered, then pick a primal emotion and depict the ultimate distillation of it.

SKETCHES

Some doodles from a video tape. I meant to draw more but I'm sooooo sleepy!

MY FAVORITE NFB CARTOONS

These National Film Board films from the late 70s and 80s are among my favorite cartoons of the last several decades. It's hard to believe now but there was a time when Canada was poised to take over the cartoon industry. Why it didn't happen would make an interesting book. The creative people were there but business mysteriously failed to recognize and support them. Why? I can only guess. As time went by a lot of NFB people were absorbed into mainstream TV and a great opportunity was lost.

"Get a Job" (above) was done by Brad Caslor who I'm told has since renounced animation and is now a live-action editor with an interest in radical left politics. People say that the Job film nearly broke his back. It was an enormous undertaking for one man and his friends to do and the film board subsidy wasn't enough to feed a mouse. When he finally dotted the last "i" in 1985 he swore "Never Again!" and turned his back on animation. Too bad! His own style was great and the Clampett influence certainly didn't hurt.




Here's (above) "The Cat Came Back" (1988) by Cordell Barker.




Here's (above)"The Big Snit" (1984) by Richard Condie. Condie's doing 3D now but I like his old 2D stuff better. His last film may have been "La Salla." You can see a clip from it on the NFB site.