Thursday 18 April 2013

Mysto the Magician Dance

Poochini is not impressed with Mysto the Magician’s hallway audition, which concludes with a little dance in “Magical Maestro,” one of Tex Avery’s best cartoons.

Here are 11 drawings used in the dance. Whoever animated it mixes them up. Some are shot on ones, some of twos, some on threes but the dance has a nice rhythm to it.



Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton animated the short. Daws Butler is Mysto.

5 comments:

  1. This is Mike Lah's animation, Yowp. Talk about the successive (or NON-successive) breaking of joints! Mark Kausler

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  2. Avery does get the plot set-up out of the way here in about 45 seconds, while it took the UPA guys about half the cartoon to get to the baton/wand justification in "The Magic Fluke". Mysto's fast patter and fast dance allow more time for the really fun parts (and when I saw this back in the late 1970s at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, it killed more than any other short on the all-Avery bill).

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  3. This is the only Avery cartoon I've seen on a movie screen. The one effect you lose on TV is when the rabbits jump into the scene from either side of the screen. Your peripheral vision is different watching a movie screen so the rabbits' sudden appearance is even more of a surprise.

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  4. I was lucky to have seen several of Avery's in a theater, and in two cases there were bursts of laughter that threatened to blow the walls down. The first was the "plucking hair" gag in this cartoon; the second was the "frog croaking" in CROSS-COUNTRY DETOURS.

    Michael

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