However, here’s a neat little inside joke in Magoo’s Surprise Party. Magoo is driving his old touring car with stickers on the windshield that would obscure anyone’s view (except Magoo’s because he can’t see properly). One of the stickers is the studio’s logo, with UPA’s letters in separate coloured ovals.
UPA continued to have unique designations for its staff. Vic Haboush is the art director in this cartoon. Bob Givens gets credit for “production design” while Gloria Wood and Jack Heiter are colour stylists. Bob Singer handled layouts.
The PC problems with Charlie's voice aside, the best thing I can say about the Magoo efforts was they did have pretty decent voicework, between Backus and Abe Levitow bringing Mel over from Warners to work (they even got in a few uses of Frank Nelson, who I don't think did any cartoon work during the classic era, outside of some Sutherland shorts).
ReplyDeletePoor Benny Rubin. Those old vaudeville dialects of his didn't work in the '60s, no matter how much UPA tried.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the TV Magoos, for me, is they just aren't funny. Five minutes of misreading signs and mistaking everything in front of him as Backus chatters away. As a six and seven year old, I felt my time had been robbed watching them when the station could have shown Bugs or a Popeye with the ship's doors.
Nelson narrated the Jerky Journeys for Len Levinson.
UPA had Bea Benaderet, too, so it gets points for that.
The only TV Magoo I can actually remember making me laugh was one with Nelson, where he plays an Art Linklette "People Are Funny"r-like TV host whose prank on Magoo backfires when he accidentally takes the host's luxury car and destroys it. Frank's voicework while freaking out on-air provided most of the fun.
DeletePart of the dilemma in producing TV cartoons was the need to put them out quickly. And the flaw of many of these is their dependency upon so much dialogue. Magoo is a single premise character, so there are so many myopic jokes you can do and it becomes predictable in such a short period. I think part of the charm in the beginning was Magoo's "innocent" mistakes and the journeys when went on, nearly fatalistic, only to come through it as if the rest of the world is wrong. I would agree that a few of the TV Magoos were memorable. One of them that I remember is his taking Wheeler and Deeler to the carnival, and they trick him into going to Cape Canaveral and go onto a rocket launch. Of course in the early 1960s, that was big stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe important thing about Magoo is not that he is myopic, but that he is stubborn and refuses to admit error. That is what makes him timeless. (And that is the trait of his father's on which John Hubley based the character.) The more unreasonable Magoo is, the more resonance he has.
ReplyDelete"Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol" redeems the TV Magoo. The epic crossover "Magoo Meets McBoing Boing"/"Babysitter Magoo" (a decade of theatrical cartoons and that was never considered?) comes close to doing so as well.
ReplyDeleteThere was one TV Magoo that listed Gil Turner as an animator so I think that may have been salvaged from an aborted theatrical cartoon. Gil worked on the 50’s cartoons when Magoo was good.
ReplyDeleteMagoo's character and the myopic gimmick started to be abandoned starting with MAGOO'S CHRISTMAS CAROL. While it was retained in the off stage wrap-arounds, he played it straight in the performance. And if anyone remembers THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MR. MAGOO, an NBC Prime Time series, the same happened there.
ReplyDeleteI still enjoy watching them. I often have disc1 &2 that someone was able to upload on YouTube..it never last more than a couple months before YouTube pulls it and kills the channel
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