Here’s an example from the Iwerks studio, in the Flip cartoon Laughing Gas (1931). A patient walks out of a dentist’s shop without paying its bill. Doctor Flip doesn’t do anything about it, but his cash register is outraged.
There’s no dialogue so these frames can tell the gag.
It’s not really funny, but it’s a cute scene.
Iwerks sure loved those irradiating lines, didn’t he? They all over his cartoons. (In an interview with Mike Barrier, Hugh Harman called them “flicker marks”).
Iwerks’ name is the only credit on the screen in this short.
Re: irradiating lines/marks: Mort Walker's "The Lexicon of Comicana" dubbed them "emanata".
ReplyDeleteI ‘member hearing that when Milton Knight was working on The Twisted Tales of Felix The Cat. One of his gripes working on that was how a simple inanimate object gag like you described became an excuse for the actor voicing said object to ramble on about what they were doing. I heard production on that was another whole can of worms entirely!
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