This is from Mama's New Hat, a 1939 Captain and the Kids short directed by an uncredited Friz Freleng.
There are some names in the cartoon, buried in the background. As a side note, I could have sworn I posted this some years ago but I can’t find it, so away we go.
If you check the door, you'll see Fred Quimby's name. The name on the awning refers to Bob Kuwahara, who must have been an assistant or in-betweener at MGM. He was an animator for Terrytoons in later years.
Fred McAlpin was MGM's sound editor. A few of his effects found their way into cartoons made by the Hanna-Barbera studio after MGM closed.
The “Harris” reference is puzzling as I don’t know of a Harris who worked at Metro. Ken Harris was, of course, at Warner Bros.
Here we come to a reference to character designer Charlie Thorson. The term “pansy” isn’t exactly complementary (Thorson was married with a small son). By the time this cartoon was released, Thorson would be gone from MGM.
He was a Canadian who had moved to the U.S. in 1934. He got a job with Disney. Thorson’s biography tells how he was working on two cartoons at the Harman-Ising studio in May 1937 that were to be part of the Disney release when he got a confidential invitation from Quimby. MGM was going to dump the Harman-Ising studio and make its own animated shorts. Thorson signed with Metro on June 7, 1937, several months before the studio actually opened.
Thorson became disillusioned with the factionalism at the new operation and wrote his feelings in a letter to Quimby on April 15, 1938, saying how displeased he was with the quality of the cartoons. He quit the studio a month and a half later and went to work for Leon Schlesinger, designing Sniffles for Chuck Jones and a rabbit for the Hardaway/Dalton unit. Next, he found work with the Fleischer studio in Miami and in 1941 with Terrytoons in New Rochelle. He later joined Dave Fleischer at Columbia/Screen Gems and then designed for George Pal’s Puppetoons. Thorson returned to Canada where his sugary-cute drawing style became obsolete. He died in Vancouver in 1966.
There is a book on Thorson called Cartoon Charlie. It's more of an art book than an autobiography, kind of like Todd Polson's Maurice Noble book
ReplyDeleteThe book also said that he had designed Droopy while at Disney for the Toroise and the Hare short and Avery borrowed it at MGM. That is really farfetched though
DeleteFrom these frames you'd think 1930s MGM cartoons were zanier and funnier than they actually were.
ReplyDeleteIf the studio had kept Freleng and Gross, things might have been a lot different. Instead, they ended up with more Harman-Ising Disney worship.
DeleteQuimby lucked out. He couldn't control the horrible infighting for two years before Hanna and Barbera rolled the studio political dice and came up with their own unit, and Avery fell into his lap.