Friday 13 February 2015

Tex Avery Played By Gene Deitch

You’ve all seen the extended-eyed, jaw-dropping takes that cartoon characters make, something that was a specialty of Tex Avery. All sorts of studios tried doing the same thing until it became passé. One of the most unexpected places you’ll find it is in one of those odd Gene Deitch Tom and Jerry cartoons, none other than “Dicky Moe” (1962). It comes in the scene where Tom is scrubbing the deck of a ship, Jerry substitutes tar for water, and Tom eventually realises what’s happened and reacts. Some drawings.



Unfortunately, Deitch doesn’t borrow timing from Avery. Tex would make sure you saw the take by letting it hang there for a bit. Deitch lets the jaw stay on the ground for about ten frames (less than a second), bounces it up with a kettle drum sound effect and then when the jaw’s back in place, Deitch cuts away to an unmatching closer shot of the cat and mouse. The take doesn’t sink in a well as it could.

Mind you, that’s the least of the problems with “Dicky Moe,” which is full of Deitch’s patented camera shakes, boings, mouths not moving when characters are yelling (I swear Allen Swift’s dialogue was recorded after the cartoon was made), overused jagged impact lines and butt-ugly, jerky animation. I’ll take Tex Avery any day. Deitch can give me the much more fun Sidney the elephant instead of this.

6 comments:

  1. And yet, while we still don't have most of Tex's cartoons on DVD (or even the complete Tom & Jerry Golden Collection, which stalled after volume 1), the Deitch T&J's will be out on DVD in June. Oh, the humanity!

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  2. Dickie Moe's story man Eli Bauer was actually able to rework the plot of the cartoon three years later and sell it to Paramount, as "Ocean Bruise", one of the final (and post-Eddie Lawrence) cartoons in the Swifty and Shorty series. The last line of the two cartoons are almost the exact same, except that the bland design and timing at Paramount, circa 1965, kept it from having the bizarre cult weirdness Deitch and his Prague animators brought to the T&J effort.

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  3. The most of the problems with "Dickie Moe" to me might be the ending (I won't spoilt it.) I/ve always liked the "Boinnng" effect,...SC

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  4. For some reason, I've preferred "Dicky Moe" to the Woody Woodpecker cartoon "Dopey Dick, The Pink Whale" of a few years before. But as to the "faux" Tom & Jerrys from after the 1957 closure of the original MGM cartoon studio (and Hanna and Barbera opening their own), whose would you take - Deitch's (with the weird camera angles, out-of-this-world sound effects and voices whose soundtrack oft didn't match the mouth movements) or Chuck Jones' (with their for-their-own-sake poses)?

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  5. I wouldn't take either of them.

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