“Did you notice,” reader Steve Bailey remarked, “the caricatures in the background of Yankee Doodle Daffy?”
No, I don’t think I have. It’s never been among my favourite Daffy/Porky outings to begin with. But behold! Porky’s office has portraits of Warners’ beloved stars on the wall. Porky, evidently, has stolen someone’s Oscar, too.
A famous cartoon director sends his love.
Too bad we can’t see the full drawing in the frame below. It’s not the same as Friz above. I love the fish statuette.
Unfortunately, the pictures below are tough to see.
And there may be an inside joke. I can’t discover whose phone number this was when the cartoon was released in 1943. There definitely was a WYoming exchange in the Los Angeles area at the time, with four numerals after the prefix.
So who was the portrait artist? There’s no credit on screen, of course. Paul Julian left the Jones unit for Freleng in February 1941 (according to Mike Barrier’s book Hollywood Cartoons), but he left the studio for the forerunner of UPA soon after, then returned. When? I don’t know. Lenard Kester was painting backgrounds for Freleng in the interim.
Thanks for answering my request! Unlike you, I love this cartoon, but you certainly covered it thoroughly!
ReplyDelete