Woody: Made in Japan?

For a guy who plead poverty, Walter Lantz sure travelled a lot.

We’ve posted a number of stories about the cartoon-maker travelling to foreign countries or on a tour of the U.S. Lantz’s stop this time is the fabulous Orient, back when you could still call it that. He left his staff in 1960 to carry on making cartoons with Fatso Bear and Gabby Gator while he made a jaunt overseas.

The Valley Times of North Hollywood talked to Lantz about it. We’ll omit his comments about Hong Kong as they had nothing to do with animation. As you might expect, Lantz griped about money, a common topic in his newspaper interviews (besides the ever-changing story about how Woody Woodpecker was invented).

Allen Rich
Listening Post & TV Review
Woody Aids Foreign Relations
Mr. Walter Lantz has just returned from a six-week goodwill tour of the Orient on behalf of Woody Woodpecker, the noisy little fella that made him a millionaire.
Mr. Lantz created Woody in 1940. The cartoon is now in its 147th consecutive week on the air (KTTV, 6 p.m., Thursdays), pecks away on screens in movie theaters in the U.S., Canada and 72 foreign countries, and the sale of Woody’s cartoon books has now reached 32 million a year in this country alone.
The producer-creator-narrator of the cartoon series visited Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Honolulu during his junket.
While in Tokyo as guest of Toho Radio and TV, a company quite anxious to introduce Woody to Japanese TV audiences, which are already more than familiar with the little fellow on Nippon theater screens, Mr. Lantz suffered a bit of disillusionment.
It seems the Japanese government restricts its TV stations from paying more than $500 for a half hour program. Such an amount would hardly pay for Woody Woodpecker’s hemlock trees, or whatever a woodpecker chews on, so it was no deal.
“But,” said Mr. Lantz sagely, “the government eventually is going to have to up the ante. The stations need' programs badly. Then we will do business."
According to Lantz there are seven TV stations in Japan and about million receiving sets. The government collects a license fee from set owners periodically.
“But there are also more than a million illegitimate sets. These have inside aerials, the government is perhaps not aware of them, and the owners get away from paying the fee,” informed Lantz.
Most television in Japan is live. There’s lots of sword play and violence, but due to low budgets the live dramas are usually played against a backdrop, a couple of chairs as props.
Favorite American programs seen on Japanese TV are “I Love Lucy,” “Perry Como Show” and “Leave It To Beaver.” Explanatory titles are super-imposed and Japanese voices are occasionally dubbed in, although the latter is a pretty expensive and time-consuming proposition. (Wonder what Lucille Ball sounds like in Japanese?) . . .
In [a] more serious vein Lantz expressed as his opinion that Woody and others of his feather and ilk in cartoon form, have done a very great deal to promote friendly relations between this country and the Orient.
"It is something they all can understand. I was treated like visiting royalty everywhere. Not because of me, but because in those countries producers, directors and writers are accorded more homage than stars. They had seen me for many years in the theater cartoons and knew I had created and produced Woody," he explained.
If Mr. Kennedy hasnt filled the post yet, how about Woody Woodpecker as the next Ambassador to Japan?
Ah, so?

Syndicated columnist Eve Starr had a chat with Lantz about his journey as well. Her column found in one newspaper of Jan. 1, 1961 read, in part:

Walter Lantz, creator of the Woody Woodpecker cartoons, just returned from Tokyo, Hong Kong and Thailand and tells me in Thailand, “They have two sets of sub-titles on the pictures, most of which are imported from the U. S. They run them with English sound and captions in both Chinese and Siamese. The titles run up half the picture, so that you can’t see what you're watching, but people don't seem to mind."
About cartoons in Japan, Walter and Mrs. Lantz, who is the voice of Woody, say, "they go in for real-life subjects, with no laughs. They are really very life-like, and quite good. Over four years ago some men from Japan visited Hollywood studios to learn techniques. I saw these same men and they are turning out two features a year—in wide-screen yet."
"In Japan," Lantz said, "people think more of the directors, writers and producers, than they do of the star. A Hitchcock will have a blown up picture of Hitch outside the theater, and large picture of directors and writers, then in small print the name of the star.

The visit to Toho is interesting. There are people well better versed in what was called “Japanimation” (okay, the first reference I’ve found to the term is from May 1986) so they will correct me, but my impression was the company was still into the monster business in 1960 and not animation.

Walter and Grace Lantz’s arrival in Hawaii was noted in the Honolulu Advertiser of Sept. 29, 1960, but it waited until Feb. 13, 1961 to report on the reason Lantz was sniffing around Tokyo. Shideler Harpe’s “Backstage” column revealed: “After a trip to Nippon, Walter Lantz has decided to make some cartoons there. A job that costs him $30,000 to make in Hollywood can be turned out in Japan for $6,000 without sacrificing quality.”

The Ottawa Citizen of March 11, 1961 reported “A Tokyo film company invited him to set up his operations at their studios.” Yet, despite the cash savings, Lantz kept making cartoons with his small group in Los Angeles. Hanna-Barbera had considered the same thing in 1959, with animation and inking to be done overseas, but decided against it because, as Variety reported, the studio crunched the numbers and found the cartoons would actually cost more to make.

For Lantz, it may have simply boiled down to his employees. By all accounts, he was loyal to those who had been with him a long time, even though the cartoons they made became increasingly mediocre and cheap-looking. His employees liked him. In Hollywood, that's an accomplishment in itself.