MiSTed: The Tale of Grumpy Weasel, Chapter 18

Yes, it’s one more chapter in Arthur Scott Bailey’s The Tale of Grumpy Weasel. The whole of my Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan fiction of it should be at this link. And I’ll try and put explanations of riffs a the end of all this.

The story so far: Grumpy Weasel has had unpleasant run-ins with several birds, a muskrat, a rabbit, and Fatty Raccoon. I mean unpleasant for them. Grumpy enjoyed it all by not enjoying any of it. Who’s going to be next on Grumpy’s agenda of disliking things? Read on …

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>
>
> XVIII

CROW: Prequel to the prequel to XXX: Ecks versus Sever.

>
> POP! GOES THE WEASEL

TOM: Out east they say ‘Soda! goes the weasel.’

>
> There were many things that did not please Grumpy
> Weasel

JOEL: So be gone with them!

> —things that almost any one else would have liked.

CROW: How do we count Fatty Raccoon’s likability?

> For instance, there was music.

TOM: [ Singing ‘Til There Was You ] o/` And wonderful roses o/`

> The Pleasant Valley Singing
> Society,

CROW: Aren’t they the people Cherry Trail keeps doing garden stuff for?

> to which most of the bird people belonged,

TOM: What, Twitter?

> did not
> number Grumpy Weasel among its admirers.

CROW: They’re hoping he supports them on Patreon, though.

> He never cared to
> hear a bird sing—not even Jolly Robin’s cousin the Hermit,

JOEL: They’ve got a lovely daughter …

> who was one of the most beautiful singers in the woods. And
> as for Buddy Brown Thrasher,

TOM: Death metal comes to the Pleasant Valley!

> whom most people thought a
> brilliant performer, Grumpy Weasel always groaned whenever he
> heard him singing in the topmost branches of a tree.

CROW: When he sung in a bush, that was different.

>
> A bird-song—according to Grumpy Weasel—

TOM: [ As Grumpy, giving a report ] ‘Webster’s Dictionary defines birdsong as the song of one or more birds.’

JOEL: Webster wasn’t working hard the day he filled out the ‘birdsong’ card.

> was of use

> in only one way: it told you where the bird was.

CROW: [ As Grumpy ] ‘Oh! Well, that’s two ways, then.’

> And that was
> a help, of course, if you were trying to catch him.

JOEL: To catch a bird, it helps to think like a bird … hey, seed!

>
> Nor did the musical Frog family’s nightly concerts

TOM: To a sold-out arena!

> have much charm for Grumpy, though he did admit that some of
> their songs were not so bad as others.

JOEL: The closer they get to that Lesley Gore sound the better for him.

>
> "I can stand it now and then," he said, "to hear a
> good, glum croaking, provided there are plenty of discords."

CROW: Grumpy’s a huge fan of the 7-chord.

>
> Naturally, knowing how he felt, Grumpy Weasel’s
> neighbors never invited him to listen to their concerts.

TOM: Sounds like a problem solved, then.

> On
> the contrary they usually asked him please to go away, if he
> happened to come along.

JOEL: It only hurt when they started inviting him over so they can leave.

> Certainly nobody could sing his best,
> with such a listener.

CROW: [ As Grumpy ] ‘Well how good do you expect me to listen with such singing?’

>
> As a rule Grumpy Weasel was glad to go on about his
> business,

TOM: Mankind was your business!

> though to be sure he hated to oblige anybody.

CROW: Has Grumpy considered passive-aggression?

JOEL: Oh, he’s thought about it but he probably wouldn’t do it nearly well enough to annoy.

> But
> one day he stopped and scolded at the top of his voice when
> he came upon the Woodchuck brothers whistling in the pasture.

TOM: How were the Whistling Woodchuck Brothers not a regular blackout gag on _The Muppet Show_?

>
> Their whistles quavered a bit when they noticed who
> was present.

JOEL: [ Whistling ‘Sidewalks of New York’, but after a few bars breaking it off to a questioning tone. ]

> And they moved a little nearer their front door,
> in order to dodge out of sight if need be.

TOM: They hope to fool Grumpy into thinking the door was whistling.

> Although Grumpy
> Weasel might follow them, there was a back door they could
> rush out of.

CROW: Won’t they be surprised when Grumpy runs in the back door?

> And since they knew their way about their
> underground halls better than he did they did not worry
> greatly.

JOEL: They know every speakeasy, pool joint, and crooked pinball parlor in the Bowery.

>
> "We’re sorry—"

CROW: But your mauling has been disconnected.

> said the biggest brother, who was
> called Billy Woodchuck—"we’re sorry you don’t like our
> music.

TOM: Would you like a coupon good for two musics?

> And we’d like to know what’s the matter with it; for
> we always strive to please."

JOEL: They’re very professional, I bet they make it big someday.

>
> "It’s not so much the way you whistle," Grumpy
> snarled, "though your whistling is bad enough, it’s so
> cheerful.

CROW: [ As Billy ] What if we’re doing it while shivering in our shoes?

TOM: [ As Grumpy ] You don’t wear shoes!

> What I find fault with especially is the tune. It’s
> insulting to me. And you can’t deny it."

JOEL: [ As Billy ] What’s so insulting about I Don’t Like Weasels? Oh, now I say it out loud I hear it.

>
> Well, the Woodchuck brothers looked at one another in
> a puzzled fashion.

TOM: They’re stumped by today’s Woodchuck Wordle.

CROW: It’s ‘WHEEP’! It’s always ‘WHEEP’!

>
> "Never again let me hear you whistling, ‘Pop! Goes
> the Weasel,’" Grumpy warned them.

TOM: Got it, only sing it a capella from now on.

> That was the name of the
> Woodchuck brothers’ favorite air,

JOEL: Huh. Well, my favorite air is four parts nitrogen to one oxygen but hey, you like what you like.

> and the one they could
> whistle best. And any one could see that they were quite
> upset.

CROW: [ As Billy ] Would you like to race to the finish of the song?

>
> "Why don’t you like that tune?" Billy Woodchuck asked
> Grumpy Weasel politely.

TOM: [ As Grumpy ] I was cheated out of the royalties.

>
> "It’s that word ‘pop,’" Grumpy said.

CROW: Oh, he’s not into pop music.

> "It reminds me
> of a pop-gun. And a pop-gun reminds me of a real gun. And
> that’s something I don’t want to think about."

TOM: He’s making a good case, have to give him that.

>
> Well, the Woodchuck brothers looked at one another
> again. But this time they smiled.

JOEL: [ Billy, as Leo Gorcey ] Give ’em the ol’ Routine 29!

TOM: [ As Huntz Hall ] Ooh! Ooh! Right, chief!

>
> "You’ve misunderstood," Billy Woodchuck told Grumpy
> Weasel. "This is a different kind of pop.

CROW: Technically it’s a sort of ginger beer.

> It means that when
> you enter a hole you pop into it in a jiffy, without taking
> all day to do it."

JOEL: Oh come on, that … makes … sense?

TOM: [ Muttering, going over the lyrics ] Go around the mulberry bush, monkey chase the weasel, all in good fun …

>
> For a wonder Grumpy Weasel was almost pleased.

CROW: For two wonders Grumpy might almost experience Gemuetlichkeit.

>
> "That’s true!" he cried. "I couldn’t be slow if I
> wanted to be!"

JOEL: [ As Grumpy ] ‘But if I wanted to I could be the fastest to being the slowest thing imaginable! You’d be so slow getting to being slow compared to me you’d never get to me! Nobody could beat my pace to not being fast if I tried at it!’

TOM: [ As Billy ] ‘Are you high?’

> And he actually asked the Woodchuck brothers
> to whistle "Pop! Goes the Weasel" once more.

CROW: Wait, Grumpy’s first moment of happiness was caused by a *fan theory*?

>
> But Grumpy Weasel never thought of thanking them.

JOEL: [ As Billy ] ‘That’s all right, our real thanks is in messing with people’s heads!’

---

[ To continue … ? ]

The 7-chord is what came up when I looked up ‘most dissonant chord’ and this site says C# diminished sounds dissonant at least. The reference to the Bowery wasn’t meant to set up the Bowery Boys riff but it works nicely. There is, of course, no agreement about what the song Pop Goes The Weasel means, but a lot of theories. Considering the lyrics now I’m not sure the Whistling Woodchuck Brothers are wrong in saying it means weasels are fast.

What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? Why don’t you make forecasts about where story comics are going? December 2022 – March 2023

I’m posting this a day ‘early’ to prove that I can too sometimes make deadline and even when it isn’t one of the Sunday-only strips that have easier plots to recap.

Yeah so this is what happens when I try to think like a writer. Last story recap came after a couple months of dealing with ‘Mud’ Murphy, ten headaches of a performer stuffed into one gigantic body. I thought there were hints being dropped that Murphy was dealing, badly, with self-destructive issues. Maybe he is, but they went unexamined in the strip. Maybe a future storyline; Terry Beatty does like bringing back characters and Murphy’s bombast does play well.

This recap, meanwhile, should catch you up to early March 2023 in Rex Morgan, M.D.. Any news about the strip I’ll post here. And there should be a more up-to-date plot recap around June 2023, in case you’re in the far future and everything I write is more irrelevant than usual.

Rex Morgan, M.D..

4 December 2022 – 4 March 2023.

After everyone called Mud Murphy a Wilbur Weston for his attention-grabbing stunt he quit Lew’s Nite Spot and the strip, at least for now. ‘Truck’ Tyler apologizes to Wanda Lastname, who turns out to be the owner of Nick’s Diner. (I hadn’t known she was anything besides a server there.) They enjoy a happy after-hours dinner. Watch this space.

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We transition over to watching Rex Morgan’s family the 13th of December. It’s some hanging around with family, particularly for the holidays. There’s a bunch of that, filling the strip from December through mid-February. The high points there are the kids worrying about getting Christmas right and then Valentine’s Day. Sarah is peeved to learn her little brothers, Michael and Johnny, have girlfriends and a whole life she (and the readers) don’t know about. It’s a deft touch. It might plant story options for the two young boys, although see my preamble for my ability to forecast what’s going on in a comic strip.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 8th of January, 2023. How did Rex, who works at the same clinic June does, get home before her?

But most of what we see is June Morgan having a full day, that gets started with January of the year. She’s trying to go to the supermarket. But a man slips on the ice in front of her and she does your basic first-response work, checking that he’s all right and able to get up and about and all. She recommends they go to the local hospital and that the Morgan Clinic is available for follow-ups.

It doesn’t end there, though. Inside, a man stumbles around asking for help. He’s diabetic and can’t read his blood sugar monitor. He is low; she gets him some orange juice and sits with him until it gets better. She scolds him to be more careful about watching his blood sugar levels and drops another plug for the Morgan Clinic.

And that’s not the end of her emergency medical caring. As she’s driving home she sees a car accident, caused by a teen driver going too fast on icy roads. The kid’s all right apart from how his dad’s going to kill him. The other driver is Melinda Jenkins, someone June knows from the PTA. I don’t know if Melinda Jenkins has been in the strip before worth mentioning. She needs an ambulance, but also calls out asking if Petey in the back seat is okay. Her son is named Tommy. Petey, it turns out, is their dog, who is fine if nervous. Once Jenkins has the ambulance crew watching over her, June’s day turns to delivering Petey to his home. That goes without incident. And it gives her time to authorize Rex to make frozen pizza like the kids have been asking for since the story started.

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Valentine’s Day is the transition to a new story, based on the multiple sets of older men finding romance with diner owners current in the strip. It starts with Truck Tyler coming back to town and visiting Wanda in her diner. (She’d inherited it from her father.) He’s thinking of settling down, now that he’s doing well enough to not have to live out of his car. And Glenwood seems like a great place what with it being where his life turned around and Wanda being a lovely woman who doesn’t mind him. Wanda confesses to liking him too, and they kiss.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 26th of February, 2023. I like how the relationships this strip get started, by the way. There’s not much drama in them, just the terror of opening up to someone you can’t ever be completely sure is going to be responsive. But it feels true to me. Like, imagine staging this scene; would it be hard to get actors to play this well? Compare even to how you’d need a pretty skilled line read to get June Morgan’s thought balloons in the other strip to not sound weird or smug.

As Tyler leaves for his upcoming gig, in walk Hank Harwood Junior and his new bride, Yvonne Grey, the Route 66 diner dowager. They talk a little about the diner and how nice it is to be retired from running one. And about their upcoming honeymoon, a country music cruise. No, Truck Tyler’s not one of the performers. This suggests where the story might be going in the next few months but, again, see my preamble. I’m not making guesses about anything.

Next Week!

And if it weren’t hard enough to guess where things are going, it’s time for my biggest challenge saying where they’ve been! Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp is the next on my schedule, for next week. I need to start work a couple days ago.

Appetite for Destruction, Satisfied by Spready Swiss-Almond Cheese

New in the neighborhood: the grocery store, the one that’s been around for a hundred-plus years and that’s just where to go when you realized you somehow both ran out of bread crumbs and need bread crumbs? It’s now got a record section. Yes, just like it’s the 70s or something. The records have got a chunk of the aisle next to the Elmer’s glue and the off-brand index cards. Not, like, obscurities, just the stuff you’d expect to get from Record Store Day For Middle-Aged Guys. Metallica’s first album. Thriller. Rush’s Album Where It’s Black and White and the Title Is Really Tiny in Little Script Letters Like It’s an Electrocardiogram or Something. Guns N Roses. I have questions about why the store has put in a record section, but the important thing is we’re all set if we need a can of cream of mushroom soup and Queen’s A Night At The Opera because our casserole is going wrong.

Why is everyone mad at _Funky Winkerbean_ this week? (December 25, 2022)

I’m not sure everyone is mad at Funky Winkerbean in its penultimate week. Annoyed, perhaps. Irritated. But mad takes a special level of broken trust between audience and creator. Annoyance or impatience is more appropriate when we-the-audience see where this is going and the story won’t get there.

Last week everyone was mad because we’d learned a time-travelling janitor manipulated minds for decades so Summer Moore could start to write a world-healing book. But it was all a dream. Then she wandered around an empty town looking at places she didn’t have any emotional connection to. Then, last Sunday, we switched to Harry Dinkle worried that the incoming blizzard might spoil the church choir concert at St Spires, his side gig. They’re doing “Claude Barlow’s Jazz Messiah”.

This week showed, in both Funky Winkerbean and its spinoff strip Crankshaft, all the big characters braving a massive storm to get to the concert. Like, everybody. Summer Moore hitchhikes her way onto the bus from the Bedside Manor Senior Living Home. (The implication is she’s spent the whole day moping and looking at, like, the instant-photo-print-shop her dad’s high school chem lab partner worked at while home from college and thinking how in the end we are all unfocused Polaroids, and now she wants to go see Harry Dinkle’s church choir sing.) The whole staff of Montoni’s. Les Moore and his wife, Not-Lisa, and Not-Lisa’s daughter from her first marriage Not-Summer. Everyone.

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 21st of December, 2022. So, uh, apparently they raised enough cash at Montoni’s going-out-of-business sale to get new snow tires? Or was Montoni’s Closing all part of Summer’s dream? But she thought her “dream” might have been overwork from doing interview for her book, that she only announced she was going to try doing when she heard Montoni’s was closing?

So everyone, I trust, gets the reason Tom Batiuk wants this. He’s getting the whole cast of both his strips together so they can bask in one another’s presence one last time. What has gone unexplained, to everyone’s mild annoyance, is the lack of any idea why it’s so important everyone get there. Especially since the church is set in Centerview, the town Crankshaft takes palce in. The Funky Winkerbean folks live in Westview, nearby but still, a bit of a drive.

Especially in the face of a storm that we were told could drop a record amount of snow. It’s the church choir doing a concert that you’d think would have been postponed or cancelled for the weather anyway. It’s not, like, John and George coming back from the dead to play with Paul and Ringo one last time.

It makes sense for Harry Dinkle to carry on despite the weather; that’s almost his defining joke. And to rope his choir into that, yeah, that’s necessary for his joke. Roping the Bedside Manor senior band, that’s his other side gig, in to providing music? Yeah, sure. But once you’re past Sgt Pepper’s Sad and Lonely Hearts Club Band? Nobody else has a reason to be there. The Time Janitor stuff somehow easier to buy, an application of that Father Brown line about Gladstone and the ghost of Parnell. The only person who wants them there is Tom Batiuk, looking to have the whole cast under one roof for the last time, and he gets his way

Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers’s Funky Winkerbean for the 25th of December, 2022. Once again the Son of Stuck Funky folks do a heroic job: they’ve figured the most likely identities of all 69 characters in this panel. And tagged which ones are Crankshaft characters so it’s okay if you don’t recognize them from hate-reading Funky Winkerbean.

It would be touching if it didn’t look like the populations of two towns decided to get stuck in a single church’s parking lot.

Incidentally on the 24th, Ed Crankshaft saw the Funky cast and said “seems like there’s a lot of new folks here tonight! Hope they’re not all planning to move into the neighborhood!”. It’s a cute way to acknowledge the Funky gang will likely still make appearances in Crankshaft. It would also be a good tip to Funky readers who haven’t heard that they might want to pick up Crankshaft.

It reminds me of when Darrin Bell put the comic strip Rudy Park into reruns. Bell had a natural disaster strike that strip and evacuate all the residents to nearby Candorville, his other — and still going — comic strip. Catch here is I don’t believe Crankshaft’s name has been spoken in Funky for, like, thirty years. It started as a cute and even realistic affectation. Characters remembered there had been a cranky old bus driver who said a bunch of funny malapropisms, but not his name. It’s a bit of a disadvantage trying to point readers to your other project, though. Even Ronald-Ann spent a week shoving the name Outland into Opus’s ears before Bloom County ended the first time. Maybe that’s this coming, final, week in Funky Winkerbean. We’ll see, and we’ll see how mad that gets us all.

The Things You Only Notice in Their Absence

You know, I think this is the farthest I’ve gotten into December without hearing about anybody’s Wham!ageddon results. I hope I didn’t just mess it up for everybody!

What’s Going On In Rex Morgan, M.D.? What was Mud Murphy sick with? September – December 2022

‘Mud Mountain’ Murphy was a delight to see enter Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D.. Most of the characters, as Beatty writes them, are pleasant enough if a bit vague. Not Murphy, who entered as a Brian Blessed-esque force of nature, all bold text and boundless energy. Story strips do great with outsized emotions and Murphy carried himself so even saying hello was outsized.

During the current story he had to run offstage rather than perform. It looked like some digestive issue, since he had just eaten four steaks, three dozen pancakes, thirty eggs (scrambled), eight gallons of mashed potatoes, a quadruple order of bacon-fried hash browns, two bystanders, six quarts of ice cream topped with twelve bananas, a Honda Civic hatchback, and five packzi. He claimed later that it was all a stunt to make himself the headliner rather than the opener. But —

Well, I noticed some points Terry Beatty dropped. We’re told that Murphy hasn’t performed in a decade. A club owner and another musician say it’s because he was unreliable about actually showing up. When Murphy does appear at the venue he talks about not having any merchandise to sell. Murphy tells a fan who mentions having a complete set of his albums that he doesn’t even have a full set of his own albums. I’d call that good crowd work if it weren’t for other mentions suggesting Murphy’s in dire straits.

When Murphy arrives at the venue Truck Tyler mentions how “I don’t think he’s showered in a while”. Murphy’s diner order is enormous like you expect from a bombastic person. But also like you expect from a starving person eating on someone else’s account. I was a grad student, I know this pattern.

Right now we’re at a point where Murphy’s story is at a sensible conclusion. He’s been a manipulative jerk and got called out on it and the regular cast are done with him. But. There is plenty of material in-text to suggest that Murphy’s dealing with some issues, plausibly a social anxiety, that sabotage his career and relationships. I don’t know whether we’re going to see him rehabilitated in the coming weeks. The room is there, is all I want to flag.

If you’re reading this after about March 2023, though, you know whether this story continued. If you don’t know how it’s turned out there’s likely a plot recap at this link which explains it. For now, for the early-December 2022 report? Read on, please, and let’s explore it.

Rex Morgan, M.D.

18 September – 3 December 2022.

We were near enough the beginning of a story last time I visited Rex Morgan, M.D. Hank Harwood Junior paid a visit to Yvonne Grey, daughter of one of his father’s old flames. They met when Hank Senior reconnected with Yvonne’s mother shortly before her death. Well, they’ve been cyber’ing, as the local news wants us to believe people call it, and the relationship got serious enough to be worth an in-person visit.

Through the visit Hank and Yvonne talk about their past relationships, and how much comfort they’ve found in each other. How close Yvonne is to retiring and turning the family diner over to her kids. Hank Junior’s challenges caring for his father. And then they turn up in the strip the next day, married.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 10th of October, 2022. The story carried on a while, mostly Hank and Yvonne figuring out whether they’ll take a honeymoon and that sort of thing. It’s all pleasant enough, getting back to Beatty’s main mission of having pleasant people to whom nothing very bad happens.

I found the development interesting. To us readers it’s entirely a retcon; we never saw a word about their relationship before this story. But it didn’t feel arbitrary. I bought that they had a happy long-distance relationship and that it made sense to them to marry on a day’s notice. It seems fast to me, but not arbitrary or foolish. So here’s hoping that all turns out well. And I note that Rex Morgan is up at least three weddings on Mary Worth in the time I’ve been doing recaps, here.

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From about the 16th of October the story moved from Hank Jr and Yvonne’s relationship over to roots country singer Truck Tyler, his agent Buck Wise, and returned-from-exile singer ‘Mud Mountain’ Murphy. Murphy’s first gig in a decade is opening for Tyler at Lew’s Nite Spot. Murphy defies his reputation by showing up in enough time that he, Tyler, and Wise can go get a bite to eat. Or, for Murphy, can get all the bites to eat. It’s a pretty fun scene in Nick’s Diner as he charms Wanda, their server, who’s a fan of Murphy. And eats pages three through eight off the menu.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 12th of November, 2022. “I have an honorary degree from Anderson College!” Yes, all the ironic readers were excited to see how Rex Morgan, M.D., would get out of doing doctoring stuff this time. Murphy saved Rex Morgan from having to M.D. anything by locking himself in the bathroom for an hour.

After his Brobdingnagian dinner, though, he gets on stage and looks unsteady. He apologizes and runs off stage, promising to be back in a little bit. Rex Morgan gets ready to do a medicine, but Murphy won’t come out of the bathroom. With the audience growing restless Tyler steps out on stage and reassures everyone that Murphy will be fine once his tummy settles. And he puts on a good show, doing his set list an hour earlier than he figured.

And as Tyler finishes, Murphy emerges, insisting all he needed was a little time for his stomach to settle. He steps out and thanks Tyler for warming up the crowd for him, a joke that Tyler doesn’t laugh at. It gets worse as Murphy repeats the joke. And after the show, talking to Wanda from the diner, he boasts how this was all a fake. He couldn’t face being only an opening act; he had to be the headliner.

Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. for the 29th of November, 2022. As you maybe gathered, I’m torn whether to take it at face value that Murphy does figure this kind of stunt is how he wants to live or whether it’s the best scheme he has to cope with whatever his real problems are.

Buck Wise is furious, but Murphy says — not wrongly — that it made a good show so what else matters? Well, it’s still jerk behavior. Wise fires Murphy as a client. And Wanda, whose name Murphy insists on pronouncing ‘Rhonda’, says after that stunt she’s not so much a fan. An angry Murphy storms out, even calling an innocent autograph-seeking fan a ‘loser’. This seems like an end to the story, but, who knows? Besides someone reading this like four weeks from now?

Next Week!

Uh-oh.

I’ll have to start writing my recap early, because it’s the manyfold story threads of Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp next week, and I know I don’t have good enough notes about them yet. Stop by next week and see if I’m completely defeated!

In Which I Consider My Music for Once

I have noticed I’m listening more to the Broadway Musicals channel on the satellite radio, and I’m curious why. Is it simply that the audience-tested crowd-pleasing music is catching my ear? Do I have a preference for the more strongly narrative, often sung-dialogue patter of many of these songs? Or is it just that so many of these songs have 16 verses and 22 choruses and, being a nerd, if I like something then I want to have a lot of it? Like, great heaping piles, enough to overflow canyons. Enough to smother giants under an avalanche of “thing”. Possibly as a side note, I also really like prog rock, a genre where a tune that runs on for 38 minutes with seven major and four minor movements in eight different kinds of acoustic character plus three poetry readings is regarded as “a quick little trifle”. There’s no way to say.

“Side note” was not intended as a pun but you’ll notice I’m letting it stand.

What’s Going On In Gasoline Alley? What’s with this Terrence Smiles guy? August – November 2022

A good deal of September and October in Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley starred mall-based piano player Sir Terrence Smiles. He was illustrated with that odd specificity that inspires the question, was this based on some real person? And yes, it was. I admit I know this only because of a comment the 15th of September by charliefarmrhere over at GoComics, but I can pass that on. Sir Terrence Smiles is a riff on Terry Miles, a YouTube guy who plays boogie woogie at shopping malls. Here’s a five-minute video with one example of this. Seems like fun. Miles has a whole YouTube channel of this stuff and that’s all I know about him and his groove. I trust he’s flattered to inspire a comic strip character.

This should catch you up to early November 2022 in Gasoline Alley. If you’re reading this after about — wow — January 2023, or any news about the strip comes out, you might find a more up-to-date recap here.

Gasoline Alley.

22 August – 5 November 2022.

Boog’s fantasy of building a spaceship for Jimmy had faded, last I checked in, replaced with building a model. He impresses his would-be girlfriend Charlotte with the toy, and everyone gets excited to launch it. Polly the parrot even calls Gasoline Alley Television to get some media coverage for the model rocket launch. This doesn’t pan out to anything. They show up after the accidental launch. But it does foreshadow the Gasoline Alley media coming around for the current story.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 27th of August, 2022. To say more direct nice things about Scancarelli’s artwork: Polly being drawn so large in the last panel is a great choice. Polly’s tail sticking over the boundary to the panel before makes for a neat transition between camera angles, and showing the bird so large supports how Polly’s dominating the story beat. It flows great. Also Scancarelli draws a nice parrot.

Polly sits on the remote control by accident, launching the rocket inside the house. It flies around, smashing up everything, just before Jimmy and Charlotte’s parents get home. They’re okay with this. Charlotte’s Mom says they were going to get new lamps and vases anyway, and jabs her husband in the gut until he agrees they totally were. You know how the women-folk be with the shopping.

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So, the 14th of September, the story transitions from all the model-rocket stuff to the mall. Jimmy discovers Sir Terrence Smiles at the piano, playing boogie-woogie. Smiles is a relentlessly cheerful, enthusiastic person, and he encourages Jimmy to sit up and play with him.

This takes us onto a conflict-free patch of story. It’s all about Smiles and Jimmy playing together. Jimmy’s a novice; Smiles is a most enthusiastic … teacher isn’t the right word. But the person introducing him to piano-playing. This includes some fanciful scenes, the sorts of nonrepresentational mood imagery that Scancarelli does well but not enough. It’s a nice depiction of struggling to learn a little of playing music. And then we get into some silliness, Smiles’s getting his sock stuck in the piano keys somehow and going on from that for a while.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 24th of September, 2022. And again, saying nice things about art: this is a great depiction of having fun while you struggle and learn a skill. Two great body language panels giving way to a non-literal representation. Good going.

Jimmy’s parents come over; he never answered their texts about it being time to go for ice cream. Smiles talks about how Jimmy’s got an impressive ability, and he goes with Jimmy and Charlotte and parents to the ice cream place.

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And so, with the 10th of October, we start the current story. It’s a Walt Wallet story. He’s working on his bucket list, in the touching belief that he might someday die. He has a couple of the wide-eyed ambitions any of us might, like walking on the moon or skydiving. He’s also got one that seems so mundane it ought to be possible: riding on the back of a garbage truck. It’s one of those fanciful ideas that caught him in childhood, to the disapproval of his teachers. They didn’t like the idea of his being a cowboy, either.

Rufus and Joel, junk dealers, are glad to give Walt a ride on their mule-pulled wagon. But that’s not the fantasy, which is to ride a garbage truck like Denzel Washington rides in the movie Fences, which I never saw. Rufus and Joel ask their friend DC, who’s in the city Refuse Department. DC would be glad to, if that were possible. The city’s garbage trucks don’t have running boards or grab bars anymore. The yard waste trucks do, but they’re not used, and anyone letting someone ride on them would get fired fast. Even if that person weren’t eight years older than the number zero.

Jim Scancarelli’s Gasoline Alley for the 2nd of November, 2022. I did not catch the yard waste guy’s name, although since his friend with the refuse department was DC I’m going to guess this guy is AC? Anyway, the comments in this whole segment of the story have been people discovering their local garbage trucks don’t have running boards anymore. Ours have those robot arms that I’m amazed can grab garbage bins and, even, the paper bags used for bagged leaves. I’ve watched this happen over and over and still can’t believe it works.

All may not be lost, though. Hulla Ballew — failing for once to identify herself as Bob and Ray reporter Wally Ballew’s sister — hears something’s up and wants to know what it is. She also forgets one time that she works for the Gasette, introducing herself as working for the Gazette instead. How will this lead to a happy conclusion? Is there a happy conclusion possible? We’ll see over the next couple months.

Next Week!

Is a shirtless Rex Scorpius going to get himself eaten by a tiger or trampled by a rogue elephant? Lots of endearingly odd developments to recap in Jules Rivera’s Mark Trail, next week, I hope!

Statistics Saturday: 1980s Music Videos

Not listed: whatever the heck is going on in Sparks’s All You Ever Think About Is Sex.

Reference: The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West, Joel Achenbach.

I’m Not Saying It’s a Bad Mash-Up, Just, It’s a Mash-Up

Woke up this morning with a mash-up of the themes to The Munsters and F-Troop on infinite play in my mind. Here’s hoping you find your heads in a better space.

60s Popeye: Popeye’s Corn-Certo (I wonder if Hungarian Rhapsody #2 gets played)

It does not. Today’s King Features Popeye is another Jack Kinney-produced short. The story’s by Joe Siracusa and Cliff Millsap. Both are new names around here, and the Internet Movie Database lists this as the only writing credit of any kind for both. Cliff Milsap was also editor for about two dozen of these shorts and that’s all IMDB knows about him. Joe Siracusa has more of a filmography, although nearly all of it as editor or composer or music editor, all the way up to the 80s G.I.Joe and Transformers. He was also drummer for Spike Jones from 1946 through 1952. Animation direction is credited to our old friend Eddie Rehberg. From 1960 here’s Popeye’s Corn-Certo.

This short has the feel of one of the theatrical Popeye cartoons. It’s a return to the plot line where Popeye and Brutus compete in showing off their expertise. Eventually Brutus incapacitates Popeye and tries making off with Olive Oyl. Popeye eats his spinach, we get some quick fighting, happy ending. The specific of competing by musical instruments calls to mind 1948’s Symphony in Spinach.

There are some structural differences from a theatrical version of this plot. The major one is Popeye and Brutus don’t take turns showing off. Popeye gets several instruments in a row to play the “3rd movement from the 2nd Pizzicato by Mozarella, the big cheese of the musical world”, which sounds like the Popeye the Sailor Man theme. (I like the choice. I imagine it’s for budget reasons. But it also plays as tweaking the artifice of the premise.) That seems like an improvement. It lets us get a bunch of Brutus-sabotages-an-unaware-Popeye jokes in a row. And it doesn’t require Popeye to sabotage Brutus or to find so many ways Brutus’s playing can go wrong. I’m not sure that would work for every challenge cartoon like this, but it works here.

I couldn’t get a screenshot of this moment that didn’t have a bit of blur in it. They must have decided to animate this moment on the ones, or the YouTube compression worked against it. Anyway you can see how Brutus, even if he did cheat by using a player piano here, is a natural piano player when he has fingers that long.

And the short offers several good little bits. The performing contest being introduced as though it were a boxing match, for example. Or Popeye getting a couple of muttered interjections in, such as saying “Man the lifeboats! I sprung a leak!” or “I should’ve played `Over the Waves`” when his flute produces water. That sort of throwaway joke could have been a muttered 30s gag and fit right in. It’s a good energy to invoke. There’s even a gorgeous throwaway bit. When Popeye says he’s beginning to smell a rat we see a delighted Brutus smiling at the camera and pointing to himself. It’s playful, in a way the best Popeye cartoons are. I got good feelings from watching this.

Given how well this works I don’t know why Siracusa and Millsap didn’t write more shorts. Maybe they didn’t enjoy the writing. Maybe they saw a chance to adapt Symphony in Spinach but didn’t see another theatrical short they were interested in. Too bad. The writing is strong enough to make a good cartoon within the studio’s constraints.

Another Curious Gap That Pop Culture Science Tells Us Should Be Filled

You know this phenomenon about things that have big enough fandoms. There’s some group that champions whatever the least important, least-loved part of it was. They’ll explain why everybody’s assessments are clouded by faulty expectations or big stereotypes or peer pressure. And they’re not being contrary hipsters. They really do think Zager and Evans deserve to be remembered for whatever song they did that wasn’t In The Year 2525.

So here’s what I’m getting at. There must be Beatles fans who figure the best, most purest expression of what was great about The Beatles was in their Saturday morning cartoon. Not the movie Yellow Submarine, understand, but the cartoon churned out in the mid-60s where Paul Frees and that guy who wasn’t Paul Frees did all the voices. The one you can get from the guy selling “totally legal” DVDs with the names written on the case in marker.

And the idiosyncratic fans are not being snarky, is the thing. They see themselves as advocates for an overlooked gem where, like, the Beatles are rehearsing in a haunted house but there’s a vampire and a ghost and a werewolf out to get them. Reason tells us they must exist.

But you don’t see them. They’re not out there raising squabbles and telling us how A Hard Day’s Night is not good, actually. There are very silly flame wars that are missing. So where are they? They must be massing their forces, gathering energy and organizing and getting ready to intrude on the public consciousness at some point. What are they waiting for and when will the invasion start? If you should know please give me a tip so I can avoid the Internet that day. Or make sure I don’t miss it because … like, I haven’t seen the cartoon but I’m guessing there’s probably an episode where, like, the Beatles swap bodies with a set of singing dogs, the Beagles, and I don’t want to miss that.

Statistics Saturday: Some People It Is Incorrect to List as “the Fifth Beatle”

• George R R Martin
• That Guy From Oasis
• Beatles cartoon producer Al Broadax
• Pelé
• St Francis of Assisi
• The Archies
• Erasmus Darwin
• Grover Cleveland
• Tommy Smothers
• 1982 Senior PGA Tour Champion Don January
• Pope Sixtus IV
• Alan Arkin

Reference: Over Here! New York City During World War II, Lorraine B Diehl.

Statistics Saturday: The Alphabet In Order Of Its First Appearance in _We Didn’t Start The Fire_

1. H
2. A
3. R
4. Y
5. T
6. U
7. M
8. N
9. D
10. O
11. I
12. S
13. E
14. C
15. J
16. P
17. F
18. W
19. L
20. G
21. X
22. B
23. K
24. V
25. Q
26. Z

Reference: Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear, Paul Fussell.

March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: The Final Pairing: HTML’s span element vs Pizzicato

HTML’s span element

The Case For: Span, short for ‘spaniel’, lets you add a dog to any web page.

The Case Against: Semantic confusion as this adds any kind of dog, not just spaniels.

Pizzicato

The Case For: Thoroughly fun sound to hear and one of music’s beautiful words to say.

The Case Against: When you’re nine years old and taking violin lessons it hurts your fingers to do.

March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: The Last Quartet: Pangaea vs Beethoven

Pangaea

The Case For: Turns out to be just the most recent supercontinent, not the only one, and they’re looking at making supercontinents again, and isn’t that cool?

The Case Against: Nerds used to say how they would put a “Pangaea Reunification Front” on their desk to make HR send out a memo about not posting political stuff and we were expected to pretend we believed that happened.

Beethoven

The Case For: Has a crater on Mercury named for him.

The Case Against: Only wrote the one opera, which is only one more than I’ve written, and I can’t even write music.

March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Godzilla vs The Yukawa Potential

Godzilla

The Case For: Deft, seamless artistic blend of gods and Nilla wafers.

The Case Against: Too whiny anymore to stomp on the pointy skyscrapers around the financial district.

The Yukawa Potential

The Case For: Is so, so good at describing pairwise particle interactions mediated by either a massless or a massed particle.

The Case Against: Is not the name of any noteworthy prog rock band or album.

March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Carols vs Rural Free Delivery

Carols

The Case For: Really nailed a kind of music for Christmas.

The Case Against: Hasn’t been a good April Fool’s Day Carol in, like, forever.

Rural Free Delivery

The Case For: Greatly reduced the cost of delivering rural areas to one other.

The Case Against: Sending cities to one another remains a money pit.

March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing: Bruce Springsteen vs Sandwiches

So, I’m aware that this is the season for putting things up against other things. And heck, I can think of things. So, here’s my first-ever March Pairwise Brackety Contest Thing. I panicked when I was filling out the forms for bracket contest names. Sorry.

Bruce Springsteen

The Case For: All-time classic songs like Born in the USA and Born to Run, plus other non-birth-related songs.

The Case Against: Though he was born in the USA, his strengths are singing and songwriting. His running is nothing of note.

Sandwiches

The Case For: For over 25 years now the most convenient way to keep hot meatballs in your hand.

The Case Against: Hasn’t been a good sandwich song in the Top 40 in months.

Sorry, I’m Stuck Thinking What I’d Use for My Passive-Aggressive Karaoke Fight

So that’s what’s got me late. I’m thinking about this in case I ever end up in a situation like Wilbur Weston’s. Except that in my case it would be different because I would feel wronged for actually legitimate reasons, unlike other people, such as him.

But there’s other problems. Like, at karaoke I can do a thing that satisfies most technical definitions of singing. But I can only sing one significant note, plus something that’s 75 to 85 percent of the way to a minor third above that note. There’s not a lot of songs written for that vocal range. It’s mostly “Mrs Brown You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter”, except that I can’t control what the significant note will be. Also I know about four normal songs, like, ones that anyone has heard of. I could imagine getting someone pretty good with that old Frank Crumit song about being a guy who builds outhouses. But that’s not as on-point as you’d imagine. Plus it’s not going to be in most karaoke machines.

It might be less trouble to just talk sincerely to people I’m mad at.

What Song Was That in the Betty Boop Cartoon ‘Bimbo’s Initiation’?

Until recently I would have said the very catchy song about “Wanna Be A Member”, centerpiece of the Talkartoon “Bimbo’s Initiation”, was made for the short. I mean if you had asked me. Or if we had a relationship where you expected me to come offer my uninformed opinions about Talkartoons. For example, if you were reading my thoughts about the short. But I should have known better about the music. This got brought to my attention:

BTW, the song that inspired the "Wanna Be a Member" tune is weird in its own way:https://t.co/0qLycmQCzo

— Jennifer Bourne (@OtherNamowal) January 6, 2022

I’m delighted to learn the extremely catchy tune has an existence outside the short. The Twitter thread there also links to another 1919 performance, one that ties the tune to Theda Bara. That’s again a name I would not have thought of for the tune, but which I should have. Theda Bara was one of the big sex symbols of the last decade of silent movies, mostly in roles of the exotic, seductive master of the scene. (Unfortunately only a half-dozen of her films are known to still exist.) This connection must reinforce the role Betty Boop plays in the short, even though the music starts before we ever see her. I’m delighted to be able to share something new about this cartoon.

Statistics Saturday: The Ten Most Unheard-of Albums of 2021

• …
• …
• um
• …
• uh
• .
• ???
• ?????
• ??
• ?

Reference: Labor and Capital In 19th Century Baseball, Robert P Gelzheiser.

Today’s Thought in Observance of the Inexorable Passage of Time

It’s a strange and amazing thought, going to the good thrift store and walking through the selection of electronic organs. It makes you appreciate just how amazing it is that each and every one of these was the consolation gift for some game show contestant in the 1970s. Imagine the tales they could tell about having been photographed for a hurried voice-over at the end of Tic Tac Dough, Card Sharks, Whew!, Lee Trevino’s Golf For Swingers, or How Do You Like Your Eggs?. All those orange-shag-carpeted voices, quiet now, and you have to ask someone to plug them in. How strange is life.

Tempus Fugitive

Sorry to be late, but I’m still trying to process how it is the satellite radio playing “Monster Mash” at me the other day. This is the time of year the satellite radio should be playing “Alice’s Restaurant”. What is “Monster Mash” doing out of its season?

Statistics Saturday: 15 Things You Can’t Believe Happened Earlier In 2021

• Bean Dad
• Sea shanties on TikTok
• Like three probes orbited or landed on Mars and one of them had a helicopter
• Balloon Boy
• The Kellogg’s strike
• That morning we all found a box of Peak Freans on our counter even though they haven’t made Peak Freans since like 1989 and nobody could explain where all these Peaks Freans came from
• That guy did that really good impression of Robin Williams learning of John Belushi’s death
• Culture Club released the hit song “Karma Chameleon”
• The imperatives of state bureaucracy drove European governments to impose family names on all their inhabitants, without regard to local culture or the lack of community need for such things
• The controversial “Rashomon” episode of Scooby and Scrappy Doo aired
• Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins died
• Ken Russell’s film adaptation of The Who’s Tommy uses rather a lot of beans, is unconnected to “Bean Dad”
• End of the Recombination era of the universe, when electrons and atomic nucleuses finally became cool enough to bind together into atoms, allowing photons to travel great distances, causing space to no longer be opaque for the first time
• Boss Baby 2 came out
• Audiences were enchanted by that “so good … but no lumps!” commercial but can’t remember, was it for gravy? For Alka-Seltzer? But Alka-Seltzer was that “Mama Mia, that’s a spicy meatball” commercial, right? That was like four years ago?

Reference: American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, Nick Taylor.

Reposted: The 36th Talkartoon: Crazy Town, a place to visit

In spotting characters from other shorts, last time I looked at this, I failed to mention the bootblack in the barber shop. He looks a good bit like the earlier, screwball, model of Bimbo, that faded out as Betty Boop got a definitive appearance. I also mention cursing myself for not geting that book of Fontaine Fox Toonerville Trolley comics. I’m happy to say I found a copy of the book, and bought it, and it’s generally quite good. It’s a panel comic, mostly highlighting the outsized personality of one of the town residents. Also I bought that Top 100 Frank Crumit Songs album on iTunes and it’s largely enjoyable, but there are some songs with racist attitudes or themes. There’s also about 14 versions of “Abdul Abulbul Amir”, including sequel songs about the wives and the children of the original song’s characters, any one of which is an interesting curio but which, if you listen to the album all at once, will drive you to crazy town.

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So after that weirdness of two Talkartoons released the same day, the Fleischer Studios went to a more relaxed pace. They didn’t release the next short until the 25th of March, 1932. This one was animated by Shamus Culhane and David Tendlar. Culhane has had credits here before. Tendlar is a new credit. He doesn’t seem to have any other credits on the Talkartoon series either. But he’d stick around, staying with Fleischer and then Famous Studios until that was finally shut down, and then to Filmation and Hanna-Barbera. I’m tickled that he’s got a lot of credits for Superfriends cartoons; a lot of my impression of what superheroes should be like are basically “like the one where the Wonder Twins are outwitted by an abandoned roller coaster”. I’m not sure Tendlar had anything to do with that one, but he is credited on the episode where a mad scientist sends a Stupid Ray back in time to prevent modern humans from evolving, so he can rule a planet of Neanderthals, and the plan would have worked except some Superfriends were visiting Skylab, which was outside the effect’s reach? … I’m pretty sure I have that right, and it’s still wrong. Anyway, here’s a Talkartoon.

The short starts with a familiar song, “Hot-cha-cha” with a fresh set of lyrics. We saw it back in Dizzy Dishes, that introduced who we’d know as Betty Boop. And it’s got a nice title sequence of looking at a booklet and letting that open into the action. Live action-and-animation hybrids were common in the 20s, always startling to people who think Who Framed Roger Rabbit or possibly Mary Poppins invented the idea. The Fleischers built their main series in the 20s on this sort of thing and it’s good to see they hadn’t lost that yet.

I also can’t see a cartoonish, overstuffed trolley without thinking of Fontaine Fox’s long-running panel strip The Toonerville Trolley, and cursing myself for never buying the book collecting strips from that used book store back in Troy, New York, in the late 90s. I don’t think there’s any reference being made here. The trolley driver and the banana-eating guy at about 3:00 in look to me like Old King Cole, from Mask-A-Raid. But that might just be that skinny old white guys in these cartoons tend to blend together.

The short itself is a long string of spot jokes. Betty and Bimbo travel to Crazy Town, and as implied, everything’s silly there. Mostly everything gets a basic reversal. A fish waves around a pole and catches a man. At the barber shop waving the scissors over a head makes hair grow. Big animals make tiny squeaks and a suspicious mouse (at about 5:45) roars like a lion. There’s not a lot of deep thinking going into the story-building here. This goes deep; the short isn’t even decided on whether Bimbo is a screwball character doing wild stuff (like early on, when he plays the trolley’s contact pole like a bass), or a straight-man to whom things happen (as when he and Betty watch with terror the approach of the Vermin Supreme ’32 supporter wearing hats on his feet and a boot on his head), or someone who comes around to embrace the weirdness (as when he gets into the barber shop’s logic). Betty doesn’t do much except react to stuff this short, but it does mean she’s got a consistent viewpoint.

I don’t think I can name a blink-and-you-miss-it joke. Everything’s given about the time it needs. I can say the train station joke, with the station holding still and the city sliding behind it, catches my imagination. For its practical benefits, of course. But also because I think of how in a couple years the Fleischers would develop that set-back camera, which let them put animated stuff in front of real-world models that move. It’s always a stunning effect. It’s often the best part of a dull cartoon. And I think of what the city-moving-behind-the-station joke would look like with that effect.

The central song, “Foolish Facts”, wasn’t written for this cartoon. It looks like it should be credited to Frank Crumit. He was renowned for recordings of “Frankie and Johnnie” and “Abdul Abulbul Amir” and writing the fight song for Ohio State University. And he recorded titles that sound like the titles you’d make up about a phonograph star of around 1930, like “She Gives Them All The Ha-Ha-Ha”, “I Married The Bootlegger’s Daughter”, “Oh! Didn’t It Rain”, “There’s No One With Endurance Like The Man Who Sells Insurance”, and “The Prune Song”. Yes there’s a Top 100 Frank Crumit Songs album available on iTunes for only US$5.99. Warning, at least one of the “Foolish Facts” verses not used in this cartoon does one of those 1930s oh-ha-ha wives-are-the-worst-right-fellas jokes. But if you can take that I have to say that’s a good value for a heaping pile of songs that all sound kind of like old-time cartoon music.

Reposted: The 34th Talkartoon: Minnie the Moocher, you know, that one.

So here’s one of the big ones, one of the Talkartoons everybody knows. I talked about it at great length back in 2018 and I can’t think of much to add here. Maybe that I still can’t stop seeing a bit of Homer Simpson in the Cab Calloway Walrus. There’s better thoughts to have.

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Today’s Talkartoon is a famous one. One that people might have heard of. Possibly by name; it often lands on the top of lists of all-time great cartoons and certainly of all-time great black-and-white cartoons. Possibly by reputation. It’s got images that define, for many people, the surreal world that pre-color cartoons did all the time. It’s a cartoon for which we have credits. The animators were Willard Bowksy, Ralph Somerville, and Bernard Wolf. Bowsky we’ve seen on (particularly) Swing You Sinners! and Mysterious Mose. Somerville is a new credit. Wolf was on Minding The Baby. From the busy 11th of March, 1932, here’s Minnie the Moocher.

Back around 2000, when the Star Wars prequels were still looked on with optimism, Conan O’Brien visited an animation studio. He played around with the motion-capture gear. They used it to render a particularly silly version of C-3PO. Jerry Beck, then with Cartoon Brew, noted that Conan O’Brien put in a great motion-capture performance. He was a natural, putting in big, expressive movements that turned into compelling animation well.

Before motion-capture there was rotoscoping. The Fleischer Brothers hold the patent, United States patent number 1,242,674, on it. The technique, filming some live-action event and using that to animate a thing, made it possible to draw stuff that moved like real stuff did. If you don’t see what I mean, look at anything animated by Winsor McCay. This line work was always precise and well-detailed and fantastic. Then look at how any object in his cartoons falls down. Yeah.

It got a bad reputation, especially in the 70s, as a way studios would finish animation cheaply. Film a guy doing the thing, and then trace the action, and you’re done. But as with most tools, whether it’s good or not depends on the source material. Use the rotoscope footage to guide the line of action and you get better results. Start from interesting live-action footage and you get interesting results. And here, finally, is my point: this cartoon starts with great live-action footage.

It starts with Cab Calloway and his Orchestra, in what Wikipedia tells me is their earliest known footage. That’s worth watching on its own. Calloway moves with this incredible grace and style, beautiful and smooth. There’s moments I wondered if the film was being slowed or sped up, with the tempo of the film itself changing. Surely not; that sort of trick is easy enough today but would take far too much coordination for an animated feature of 1932. They’re building the short on rotoscoping some awesome footage.

So awesome it barely matters that Betty Boop is in the short. Even less that Bimbo is. There’s a bare thread of a reason for any of this to happen. A hard-to-watch scene of Betty’s father berating her, leavened by the weirdness of her father’s rant turning into a well-played record. And to ramp the weirdness up a bit, her mother changing the record. Betty’s given comfort by inanimate objects around her that she doesn’t notice, then decides to run away from home. She writes a farewell letter, and about 3:06 in draws Koko the Clown out of the inkwell. It’s a cute joke; most of the Koko the Clown cartoons did start with Koko being pulled out out of the inkwell. Koko’s also the figure that the Fleischers first used rotoscoping to animate. They can’t have meant that subtle a joke. It’s enough to suppose they saw someone dipping a pen in an inkwell and referred to that. But it does serve as this accidental bit of foreshadowing of what would happen.

What happens is Cab Calloway, rotoscoped and rendered as a walrus and singing “Minnie the Moocher”, then a brand-new song. Betty and Bimbo spend the song watching the walrus sing and dance. The backgrounds smoothly dissolve between nightmare scenes. Weird little spot gags about skeletons and ghosts and demons and all carry on. Eventually a witch(?) arrives and everybody runs off, possibly chasing Betty back home, possibly running from the witch(?).

(Quick question: why is Bimbo here? He doesn’t do anything besides be scared, and Betty’s already doing that. Is he lending his star power to the short? … Well, I can think of a purpose he serves. There’s a sexual charge in a strange, powerful menacing a lone woman. That the being is a rendition of a black man adds to the sexual charge. That the woman is here depicted as young enough to be living with her parents heightens that further. But having Betty and Bimbo together diffuses that charge. It’s not eliminated, and I think the short benefits from that charge being present. But it leaves the menace more exciting than worrisome. I don’t know that the animators were thinking on that level. It’s enough to suppose they figured the series was a Betty-and-Bimbo thing so of course Bimbo would be there. Betty hasn’t had a solo vehicle yet. I think it’s a choice that makes the short work better though.)

So there’s not much of a plot. And Betty and Bimbo don’t do anything interesting. That’s all right. This short is built on its technical prowess. Cab Calloway’s dancing is this wonderful magical thing. It turns into animation that’s magical. (For the most part. There’s a bit of the walrus chucking ho-de-ho-de-ho at about 6:58 in that my brain insists on reading as Homer Simpson laughing. That’s not this short’s fault and I hope I haven’t infected you with the same problem.)

There’s all the body horror you could want in this short. To me, the creepiest moment is the cat nursing her young; you, take your pick. The joke that I think it’s easiest to blink and miss has a well-established setup. That’s in how Betty, running away from home, rolls up the one thing she plans to keep, her toothbrush. The joke is she tosses it aside before jumping out the window. It’s so quick a thing did you even notice it when you first watched? I don’t spot any mice in the short, which surprises me since they could fit the ghosts-and-spirits styling easily. Maybe they ran out of time.

Reposted: The 32nd Talkartoon: Boop-Oop-A-Doop, At Last

When I reviewed this I couldn’t identify a blink-and-you-miss-it gag. I think I’ve spotted one, though. As lion tamer Betty Boop cracks her whip at the lions, there’s one moment where the whip grows a hand that snaps at the lion. That’s a cute, silly little thing. And I seem not to have noticed it before. As the subject line suggests, my thesis is that this is finally a fully-formed Betty Boop cartoon, with all the elements in place and working together. But that includes sexual assault, done with more explicitness than usual. Please be advised if you don’t need that in your recreational reading.

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It’s another Talkartoon without animation credits. There’s one more, after this, for which we don’t know or have a strong idea who the animators were. And it’s a shame (as it always is) to not know, since this is a cartoon with several noteworthy claims to historic interest. It also needs a content warning. There’s a lot of Betty Boop cartoons with sexual assault as subtext. This time around it’s pretty text. If you duck out at about 5:40 you can avoid the whole thing.

Also I apologize that the archive.org version is so badly pixellated. There’s a much clearer version on YouTube, but I am not at all confident that’s an archival-quality URL. At least for right now here’s a much cleaner version.

So this was the second Talkartoon of January 1932, coming out on the 16th. And it’s of historic significance. It’s the first appearance of the title song “Sweet Betty”, Betty Boop’s theme. I believe it’s the first time we get Betty Boop’s name shown on-screen. And we’ve finally got a very clear example of the Betty Boop Template Cartoon. It’s several minutes of puttering around with spot gags and little jokes, and then the Big Bad, with lust in his eyes and cutaway x-ray of his heart, tries to abduct Betty Boop, until her more desirable suitors pursue and vanquish him.

To my tastes the first part of the cartoon is the best. A circus offers plenty of room for little jokes. And for great dramatic angles. I like the severe angle for the high-diving act, but one could argue that’s the only shot that would make the joke read at all. The angle for the lion sneaking up on Betty is a more free choice, and it’s a great one, very nicely heightening the sense of danger.

That’s also the completely plotless part, though. Not that any of the jokes are bad. Just there’s no reason they have to be in this or any other order, and none of them build to anything. My favorite would be the fat girl who grows and shrinks with each cycle of an air pump. You take your pick. All the jokes are established well enough I don’t think there is a real blink-and-you-miss-it joke. Maybe I blinked and missed it. The closest would be that the bearded lady’s beard is growing so fast that her helper is cutting it every beat. There are some suspicious-looking mice, appearing about 1:12 in as the Tall Man falls apart. (If you don’t recognize what’s going on with the elephant and Koko the Clown, it’s this: the elephant has a giant inkwell on his back. The elephant pokes his trunk into the inkwell and squirts out a drop that turns into Koko, an imitation of how silent-era Koko the Clown shorts started.)

So this time around Koko the Clown takes billing above Bimbo. Bimbo appears, he just doesn’t get billing. He gets a decent runner of a joke, as the peanut vendor. And gets to have Aloysius, it looks to me, as target for his vending. The choice seems odd. If you don’t recognize Aloysius then it’s just an odd choice to cast an infant in a role that any character could do. But if you do recognize Aloysius as Bimbo’s little brother then it’s a really odd choice to cast him in a role that any character could do.

And after five and a half minutes of amiable small jokes the plot kicks in. The ringmaster’s heart grows lusty and he — you know, as the template plot develops it gets less explicit. You get a big bully-type character who just abducts Betty Boop. Coming into her tent and asking if she likes her job? That’s a little raw. It’s a relief that Betty Boop seems to be adequately fighting him off. Also that Koko leaps in to her defense. I’m amused that he gets kicked right back out five times over, and he’s only able to successfully fight off the ringmaster by fighting ridiculously, with a big ol’ hammer.

Betty Boop sings “Don’t Take My Boop-Oop-A-Doop Away”, one of the enormously many catchy little tunes that Sammy Timberg wrote for the Fleischer Studios and, later, Famous Studios. The most-used of them has to be “It’s A Hap-Hap-Happy Day”, which you can hear in the introductory scene on ever Famous Studios cartoon from 1940 to 1966. And I know what you’re thinking but no, “I’m Popeye The Sailor Man” was written by a completely different Sammy working for Fleischer Studios. Sammy Lerner.

It’s the first cartoon with “Don’t Take My Boop-Oop-A-Doop Away”. It’s not the first time Betty Boop’s sung it, though. Because, but good grief, on the 26th of December, 1931, Paramount dropped a live-action short starring Rudy Vallee. In Musical Justice Rudy Vallee and his band are the judge and jury at the Court of Musical Justice. It’s one of a peculiar genre of shorts from back in that day. In this genre, modern music is held up as this terrible stuff that’s degrading society and all that. But it’s argued, successfully, that this stuff isn’t really bad. Sometimes there’s an argument that modern music reflects classic rules of composition and all. Sometimes even that it uses bits of Great Music.

Anyway, so, in Musical Justice Betty Boop, played by Mae Questel for what I think was the first time, pleads for Judge Rudy Vallee and the jury the Connecticut Yankees to let her go on singing heartfelt lines like “Boop-oop-a-doop”. I think the song gets a couple more uses, but not so many. That’s all right. It’ll stick in your head already.

Reposted: The 24th Talkartoon: Bimbo’s Initiation, the only Bimbo cartoon you ever heard of

So here in this repeat performance we get to the one Talkartoon people who aren’t into black-and-white animation might have heard of. It’s really good. Funny, well-paced, weird, with snappy music and amazing technical skill. The only reason not to use it to convince someone of the worth of black-and-white cartoons is they might expect everything will be like this. And this comes right after the high point of The Herring Murder Case. The studio was having a great season. This cartoon has an edge over The Herring Murder Case and Swing You Sinners! by avoiding obvious ethnic or racial jokes.

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I knew when I stumbled in to reviewing the Talkartoons that there were few cartoons my readers might plausibly have seen. There’s The One That Introduced Betty Boop (Dizzy Dishes). There’s The One Where Cab Calloway is a Walrus (Minnie the Moocher). And then … there’s this. It’s always listed as the best Bimbo cartoon. It’s often listed on the top-50 or top-100 cartoon shorts. It’s listed as one of the best Betty Boop cartoons, on the basis of a few seconds of cameo appearances. I learned, almost memorized, it watching it on the eight-VHS Complete Betty Boop series in the 90s. The animator is uncredited. This is so unfair. Everyone says Grim Natwick. It was originaly released the 24th of July, 1931, and Wikipedia says it ended the 1930-31 film season for the Talkartoons.

Let me clear out the bookkeeping. There’s a Suspiciously Mickey-Like Mouse at 0:35, putting the cover on the sewer and locking Bimbo into his adventure. The strongest body-horror gag has to be when Bimbo’s shadow gets beheaded. I’m inclined to think all the jokes here are so well-framed there’s not a blink-and-you-miss-it gag. But I also remember the guy I hung out with weekends in grad school blinking and missing the bit where Bimbo reaches for a doorknob and it flees to the other side of the door, so that counts for that. On to the bigger-picture stuff.

There’ve been several Bimbo-trapped-in-a-surreal-landscape cartoons. I’d rate this as the best we’ve seen, but would entertain arguments for Swing You Sinners!. It’s certainly the most nightmarish. Previously Bimbo’s at least transgressed in some way, however minor, before getting tossed into the nightmare. Here he’s minding his own business and the weirdness comes out to eat him. Hurrying right to the craziness also means there’s plenty of time to stuff the cartoon full of it.

This cartoon shows an incredible amount of skill behind it. There’s no slack points. There’s some quieter moments in the craziness, yes. They’re deployed with this great sense of pacing, chances for the audiences to rest before the action picks up again. Too much frenetic action is exhausting; here, the tempo varies well and reliably enough that the cartoon stays easy to watch.

And the cartoon is framed so well. There’s a healthy variety of perspectives. There’s changing perspectives, several times over, as Bimbo comes to the end of a tunnel and gets dropped off into a new room. Changing perspectives is always difficult for animation. Even in the modern, computer-drawn or computer-assisted era it’s difficult to make look right. And Bimbo’s Initiation pulls the trick several times over.

The segment that most amazes me every time I watch it starts at about 4:45, after Bimbo’s swallowed by the innermost door. Watch the line of movement. Bimbo’s falling towards the camera, tossed side to side by the chute. He then runs toward the camera and to the left, in roughly isometric view, as axes fall. Then he hops onto the spiral staircase, running down while the camera rotates around his movement. Then he jumps off the staircase into a hall to run to the right. His second, beheaded shadow, runs up and joins his actual shadow. Then he turns and starts running toward the camera as steel doors snap shut behind him. This is all one continuous, seamless shot, without an edit until 5:26. And when it does edit it’s to zoom in tighter on Bimbo, with the doors behind. He keeps running toward the camera until he falls out that chute and the camera pivots to the side, at about 5:42. It’s such an extended and well-blocked sequence. That 57 seconds alone shows how misleading it is to say cartoons of this era were nearly improvised. There was planning going in to how much stuff would fit here, and how it would fit together. The music supports this too. I’m not sure there’s been a Talkartoon with as tight a connection between the tune and the action.

I’m not sure there are any poorly-composed or poorly-considered shots in the cartoon. The shot of Bimbo lighting a candle, seeing the rope snap tight, and then following that to the spikey trap above is as perfect as I’ve ever seen in any cartoon or movie.

Insofar as there are any weaknesses here, it’s that the setting does obliterate Bimbo as a character. There were a couple cartoons where he was developing into a low-key screwball character. He could be sort of an Early Daffy Duck that isn’t so tiring to imagine around. Here, he can’t say or do anything interesting enough to stand up to the setting. Looking at the list of future Talkartoon titles I don’t see any that feature Bimbo as much of a character. The studio’s shifting to Betty Boop. It’s an interesting choice considering she hasn’t had a good part yet. Bimbo’s moving to be her boyfriend or partner or the guy who’s around while she’s center stage. Shame he doesn’t get better parts, but at least he could be the star of this. How many characters never get even one good outing?

Reposted: The 23rd Talkartoon: The Herring Murder Case

When I first reviewed this one I mentioned its strange lack of a dedicated Wikipedia page. It still lacks one, for reasons not obvious to me. It’s one of the strongest Talkartoons. I might nominate it as the best-plotted one, too. It’s got a lot happening, almost all of which works. And it’s the sort of cartoon that shows why black-and-white cartoons get devoted fans. I’m sorry not to have a cleaner print, or one with better sound. But you can still enjoy a packed, almost over-full, cartoon here.

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I’ve been trying to watch these cartoons in the order of their release. And that I get from Wikipedia’s page about Talkartoons. Some individual cartoons have their own Wikipedia pages. Many of the earliest don’t, but as the series shifts from “any old thing with a song” to “Bimbo” and finally “Betty Boop Cartoons” fewer entries lack pages. This week’s hasn’t got a page and I’m surprised by that. It’s talked about in Leslie Cabarga’s The Fleischer Story in the Golden Age of Animation, the book on the studio’s history. Not much, but think of all the cartoons that don’t get even that.

Wikipedia does credit this as the first appearance of Bimbo in his “canonical” form. And as the first sound cartoon appearance of Koko the Clown, the character that made the Fleischer Studios and star of extremely many cartoons about him being drawn, getting into a fix, and then being poured back into an inkwell. Would really have thought those two points noteworthy enough for a page to be made. Anyway, the credited animators are Shamus Culhane (then listed as “Jimmie”; when he went into business for himself he took on a more distinctive-to-Americans name) and Al Eugster. Both have already had cartoons in this series before. Originally released the 26th of June, 1931 — more than a month after Silly Scandals — here’s The Herring Murder Case.

Quick content warning: there’s a pansy-voice character and a couple lines approaching (Jewish) ethnic humor. I don’t think they spoil the cartoon (one could even say the ethnic-humor bits are just characterization). But they are there.

So, for the record, the first words spoken aloud by Koko the Clown — at the time, a character a dozen years old and the flagship character of the studio — were “[ stammering gibberish ] my come — come on, the poor — poor herring- herring was sh- sh- shot, oh my, come on, help”. Not an auspicious start. But it is plot-appropriate, for the rare Talkcartoon that has a clear and direct plot.

That friend you have who doesn’t quite like anything however much he likes it has a complaint about Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And, like your friend at his most irritating, he kind of has a point. Toontown looks like a great place. But it has an inauthenticity to it. Actual cartoons of the Golden Age of American Animation weren’t so frantic and busy and packed as the Toontown sequence was. It’s defensible artistically. For one, the daily lives of each Toontown citizen is their life story with themselves as protagonist; that we normally only have to take six minutes of a character at once doesn’t mean the rest of their days aren’t like that. But it does mean there’s much more stuff happening visually than an actual cartoon of around 1947 would have.

Most of the time. Some cartoons do get that dense and packed with weird activity. And here, from 1931, is one that’s like that. Especially right after the Herring’s murder: the scenes of the city are full of everything happening, including buildings come to life and writhing in a panic. And then special effects get in the way. After Koko comes on, in animation I assume is swiped from an older Out of the Inkwell cartoon, he runs through a city street haunted by ghostly cat heads for the reasons. It’s one of a lot of showy bits of animation technique in the cartoon.

Another: Bimbo following footsteps up the stairs. It’s a walk cycle, yes, but it’s one that moves in very slight perspective. It’s well-done, and a bit hypnotic. They’ll do a similar walking cycle on steps in the next cartoon, one with more amazingly done animations. But there are a lot of extreme perspectives and stuff moving in on the camera and tricky camera moves throughout the short. In ranking of animation ability the studios have always been Disney first, and everybody else behind. But the Fleischers were often second, and this is one of those times they were a close second.

Among my favorite cartoon motifs is doing simple stuff in complicated ways. The short offers plenty of that, starting with the gorilla’s shooting a gun that itself shoots out a bird that does the shooting. Koko putting his head through the window twice while trying to lead Bimbo to the crime scene. Koko running ahead of his “shadows” and having to go back to get them. The elevator opening up to a set of stairs.

Did you blink and miss that the level indicator makes two full circuits while getting the stairs down to ground level? That’s my favorite quick little joke. But there’s plenty to choose from, such as the moon being blown along by the heavy winds as Bimbo and Koko get to the house. The secret panel offering Bimbo a short beer is too well-established to be a blink-grade joke. But it gets a little more charge when you remember the short was made in 1931, still during Prohibition.

The female herring gets Mae Questel’s voice this short, so there’s no figure who can at all be credited as a proto-Betty-Boop. A shame, since Betty’s involvement however fleeting would probably have got this cartoon more notice. Its got a clear story, quite a density of jokes, a soundtrack that clearly ties to the action, and even a sensible ending. I like 30s cartoons, especially from the less-than-Disney studios, but recognize that as one of my eccentricities. This is one I don’t think an ordinary person would understand as funny.

There’s another of those mice popping in, one with Happy Feet at about 5:21, and then possibly a different one fleeing the gorilla at about 5:50. I trust that “They shot me! Holy mackerel, is this the end of the Herring?” is an imperfect quoting of Little Caesar, which opened in January of that year and made Warner Brothers all the money in the world. Can’t blame the Fleischer studios for riffing on that.