Review: 'Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling'

This year the studio behind such watershed pictures as The Jazz Singer, Gold Diggers of 1933, Casablanca, White Heat, Bonnie and Clyde, A Clockwork Orange, Superman, and Malcolm X turns 100. Mark A. Vieira marks the event with an illustrated history of the studio called Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling. 

Review: 'Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Collection'

 (Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this Blog post. The opinions I share are my own.)

The Flintstones and Tom and Jerry are fine for a dose of nostalgia, but there’s a reason that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies are timeless: they are still really, really funny. No other cartoons of their era packed such a wallop of anarchy, imagination, and wild one liners. 

The most memorable lines spewed from the buck-toothed grin of Bugs Bunny. Bugs could be sarcastic, salacious, or just plain screwy, but he was always hilarious. There was tremendous variety in the situations and the ways Tex Avery, Robert McKimson, Friz Freling, Bob Clampett, or Chuck Jones depicted him, but the wabbit was invariably puncturing pomposity and annihilating authority. I started showing Bugs Bunny cartoons to my son when he was still in diapers to help him develop a healthy spirit of rebellion and an unhealthy sense of humor. His hankering for carrots was an unintended side effect.

 

Review: 'It’s Saturday Morning! Celebrating the Golden Age of Cartoons 1960s-1990s'

Okay, so not every cartoon Joe Garner and Michael Ashley cover in It’s Saturday Morning! Celebrating the Golden Age of Cartoons 1960s-1990s aired on Saturday morning. In fact, they aren’t even all cartoons (see the entry on Pee Wee’s Playhouse). Yet the writers do a good job a selecting the shows that best defined each of the four generations their book explores. These are not cursory, encyclopedia-style entries; each is about four or five pages long, and each gets reasonably in depth about the genesis, content, and legacy of shows never intended to have a legacy once the six-year olds lost interest: Josie and the Pussycats, GI Joe, Space Ghost, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, The Smurfs, and so on.

The odd part (aside from the authors’ bizarrely clueless insistence that all of these shows aired on Saturday mornings) is that Garner and Ashley deal with such a weightlessly fun topic as if has some greater value than stimulating nostalgia. The tone of the book should have been fun, friendly, and perhaps even a bit snarky, like that of Robinson and Karp’s Just Can’t Get Enough: Toys, Games, and Other Stuff From the ’80s That Rocked. The reverence seems to miss the obvious fact that most of these shows were great fun for six-year olds buzzed on Frankenberry but pretty crappy in essence. Garner and Ashley want us to believe that The Smurfs has a “complex mythology,” Garfield possessed “smart storytelling,” and that most of these shows were better animated, better written, and more educational than they actually were. All I ever learned from watching He-Man was how to perfect my Christmas wish list. There’s also a dogged determination to keep things reverent, which becomes a bit odd during a discussion of Fat Albert that continually references Bill Cosby’s artistry without at all acknowledging the monstrousness for which he is now best known.

While the tone could have been more appropriate to the material, the look of It’s Saturday Morning! gets everything right with big, color images from those delightfully garish childhood memories.

Farewell, June Foray

Without her Talky Tina wouldn't have talked. Neither would hundreds of other characters, because June Foray was one of the busiest voice actors in the business. She is best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, who always served as a sensible counterpart to the flightier Bullwinkle's. More befitting Psychobabble's creepier sensibilities, Foray gave voice to the hair-pin shedding  Looney Tune Witch Hazel and the most terrifying killer hunk of plastic in the Twilight Zone, Talky Tina (based on her own recordings for the Chatty Cathy doll).

Foray was kept busiest putting words in the mouths of Bullwinkle's nemesis Natasha Fatale, Tweety's Granny, Cindy Lou Who, Raggedy Ann, numerous Smurfs,  and other cartoon creations, but she also dubbed live actors on occasion, including the little girl in the "Bewitchin' Pool" episode of The Twilight Zone, and fascinatingly enough, both of Chief Brody's kids in Jaws. She even made a handful of onscreen appearances in shows such as Bewitched, Green Acres, and Get Smart, but she'll always be best remembered for the sounds she made over her rich, 71-year career. June Foray died yesterday at the age of 99.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 243

The Date: May 30

The Movie: Yankee Doodle Daffy (1943)

What Is It?: One of the great cinematic tragedies was how the wild, care-free, anarchic spirit of one of our great actors was ultimately crushed, reducing him to a cynical and luckless shell of what he once was. However, in 1943, Daffy Duck was at his insane best, and he was rarely better than when he was trying to peddle the multiple talents of Sleepy Lagoon to agent Porky Pig in the gloriously hilarious "Yankee Doodle Daffy". I'll take "Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!" over "You're dethpicable" any day.

Why Today?: On this day in 1908, Mel Blanc is born.

It's the Psychobabble Halloween Special!

With its rituals of begging for candy, playing dress up, and believing in the kinds of things you should stop believing in at age seven—Flying witches! Ghosts! Werewolves! Pumpkins!—Halloween is definitely a kids holiday. I admit that even as I get more into Halloween the older I get. That’s because adult children such as myself can indulge in a month-long orgy of horror movies with content way to axe-centric for Trick-or-Treating tykes. When it comes to feature films, the kids are mostly shut out despite a few seasonal kid-friendly flicks like Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and Mad Monster Party (am I dating myself with my references? Nah.). Kids generally need to turn to the small screen for their Halloween entertainment. Fortunately, there’s plenty of Halloween entertainment on TV to eliminate the dangers of playing outside in the late-October fresh air. At least there have been since the late 1970s when annually aired Halloween specials really became a thing on TV. Before that period, specials popped up pretty infrequently outside of spooky episodes of “Bewitched”  (“Trick or Treat”; “Twitch or Treat”) or “The Beverly Hillbillies” (“Trick or Treat”—are you sensing a lack of imagination here?). Other shows like “Gilligan’s Island” and “The Monkees” really blew it by airing episodes such as “Ghost a Go-Go” and “The Monstrous Monkee Mash” far removed from the holiday (and both series aired shows on October 31^st during their runs, so the scheduling was extra stupid).