INTERESTING LINKS: Koko the Clown Flipbook at Uncle John’s Crazy Town: February 17th, 2009

STWALLSKULL'S INTERESTING LINKS

TODAY’S FEATURED ITEM:

Uncle John’s Crazy Town brings us a cool little Koko the Clown flipbook you can print, apparently from a book called Betty Boop’s Movie Cartoon Lessons. I hope he posts more stuff from the book!

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Nimbus Libéré

THE CARTOON CRYPT

A excerpt from a weird and ugly (but interesting) WWII propaganda cartoon made by inept and humorless nazis featuring Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Donald Duck, Goofy, Felix, and horrible Jewish stereotypes. I’ve seen a lot of WWII propaganda from the Allies, but not much from the Axis… presumably most of it was destroyed. If all their animation was this uninspired, it is no wonder we won the war.

WARNING: This cartoon contains offensive ethnic caricatures. If offensive stereotypes bug you, you may not want to view it.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Popeye in Shiver Me Timbers (1934)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Another cartoon for the ongoing Vintage Spooky Cartoons list… the Fleischers’ Popeye versus a ghost ship.

Unfortunately, the only version of this available online that I can find right now is the colorized version. I’m not talking Ted Turner colorized either… bad as that is, this is much worse. My understanding is that at some point (around the time color television came around?) some brilliant entrepreneur decided it would be a good idea to make a buck by remaking some old public domain black and white cartoons in color by tracing cartoons on the cheap, coloring them and re-filming them. The results are poorly traced, and hideously colored, with far less “in-betweening” than the originals… leaving the animation a clunky, jerky, ugly mess… a hollow shell of the original. I imagine that they generally have chunks of the cartoon outright missing as well, judging from the budget-minded nature of this monstrous process (not to mention the sort of censorship that inevitably occurs when dimwits revisit the material of yesteryear and judge it by modern standards). In the very likely event I have any of this information wrong, someone out there please do correct me in the comments. Needless to say, I’ll replace this with a black and white version if it becomes available.

Read more about this cartoon on the Big Cartoon Database.

STWALLSKULL’S CARTOON CRYPT PRESENTS: Vintage Spooky Cartoons

STWALLSKULL'S CARTOON CRYPT PRESENTS: Vintage Spooky Cartoons

In eager anticipation of Halloween, here is a directory of the vintage spooky cartoons that have been compiled on this site so far. I’m going to be adding a lot more over the next month or so, so please do check back. Please note that you can subscribe to this site here to keep up with the latest posts.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: Everready Harton in Buried Treasure (1929)

I recently saw this cartoon on The Panopticist via Boing Boing. It is likely to be the first pornographic animated cartoon, and it is a doozy… boy is it funny.

Read more about this cartoon at The Panopticist. There they quote Wikipedia quoting Ward Kimball…

The Wikipedia page includes this backstory quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball: “The first porno-cartoon was made in New York. It was called ‘Eveready Harton’ and was made in the late 20’s, silent, of course—by three studios. Each one did a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Studio A finished the first part and gave the last drawing to Studio B. … Involved were Max Fleischer, Paul Terry and the Mutt and Jeff studio. … A couple of guys who were there [at the party] tell me the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it.”

WARNING: This is a hilariously pornographic cartoon. If smut offends you, you may not want to view it. If you are under the age of 18, don’t watch it until you are, because you could probably get me in trouble, you naughty little imps.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: More on Peeping Penguins (1937)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

I watched Peeping Penguins on the Fleischer Color Classics compilation dvd Somewhere in Dreamland again this weekend, and I was correct that it is missing footage (in addition to the previously mentioned altered soundtrack missing the song “Curiosity Killed the Cat”). The penguin playing and almost killing himself with a loaded rifle has been eliminated from the sloppily edited version on the Dreamland dvd. You can get the full version on a shoddily manufactured but chock full of great stuff compilation called 150 Cartoon Classics. Or you can just watch it online:

You’ll want Somewhere in Dreamland for the rest of the Color Classics, though (except for the one it doesn’t include)… in spite of its flaws it is a fantastic and almost complete compilation of the Color Classics:

I’ve extracted the song Curiosity Killed the Cat (along with some of the rest of the soundtrack) as an mp3 which you can download here.

Read more about Peeping Penguins on The Big Cartoon Database here.

THE CARTOON CRYPT: The Kids in the Shoe (1935)

THE CARTOON CRYPT

Here’s another wonderful and weird Fleischer Color Classics cartoon. This one has a fantastic soundtrack featuring Smiley Burnette’s song Mama Don’t Allow No Music Playing Round Here. I don’t know who performs it in the cartoon… if you do, please let me know in the comments and I’ll update this post. I’ve extracted the song to an mp3, which you can download here.

You can get all but one of the Color Classics on this great DVD set called Somewhere in Dreamland:

Unfortunately, the print of this one is particularly beat up, so it is only included in the “Lost Episodes” documentary on the disc rather than being easily available from the main menu.

Read more about this cartoon on The Big Cartoon Database.